Paul Cramer - General Manager EAM at Changepoint

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Paul Kramer from Changepoint, and we discuss the ways you can leverage enterprise architecture management to propel your organization forward, how to get better results by asking better questions, and why your business continuity plan may be in need of a complete overhaul. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:25) This is the Modern CTO podcast. It's dark and rainy here, so the office is really dark.

(Paul Kramer at 00:00:41) Yeah, and your look is all changed up. I'm all upside down now. I watched some YouTubes. I'm like, alright, I feel like I know this guy. Who are you? That's just not the same guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) I've taken over Joel. You can't get haircuts, and so I was like, alright, well, if the hair's growing, it looks, you know, I'll balance it out. And I've never had the opportunity to grow a beard before, so I took this. There's a positive to the situation. Are you at your house right now?

(Paul Kramer at 00:01:15) I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:17) I have a music room too. Is that a music room?

(Paul Kramer at 00:01:19) It's spot on, man. Spot on. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) What's that? You got a drum set there? What's going on?

(Paul Kramer at 00:01:25) So yeah, that's a Sonar SQ1. So that's my drums, and then on the other side is, you know, amps and guitars and stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) Oh, nice. I have a music room at my house too. We've got some digital drums and then some acoustics, some electrics, and piano. Musical family.

(Paul Kramer at 00:01:45) Nice. Yeah, my youngest plays lead guitar. We're trying to convince one of my other boys to play bass, but that's not working real well. So every now and then I'll play bass. But it's just a place to come and just get loud. I mean, literally, you can crank everything, and you could be right above us, you can't hear a thing. The guy who did Paisley Park helped do this room, so it's top shelf. It's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:14) So you into music right off the get-go? Was your parents and family into it growing up?

(Paul Kramer at 00:02:20) No. I mean, I would say yes. I grew up on Motown stuff. I actually thought Motown music was Christmas music. You know, when I first heard Earth, Wind & Fire outside the context of Christmas, I'm like, oh, it's not Christmas music. But no, not particularly. It was truly accidental, really. I fell into it completely by accident and I'm just a hack. I got in a bunch of bands. I was arrogant enough to think that I was good enough and just started playing with bands, and it just took off from there. So I would say for a good five years, you know, played around a lot, toured a little bit, made a couple albums.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:05) Really?

(Paul Kramer at 00:03:06) Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:06) That's awesome. My brother-in-law is a music producer.

(Paul Kramer at 00:03:10) I did a lot of it. I'm so jealous. I wanted to be in the music business so bad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:15) Yeah, it took him a long time. I think he's like 55 now-ish, but I mean, he definitely put in his 20 years. He did some touring and then he stopped in Orlando and ended up doing a lot of the, in the early 2000s, like the boy bands and things like that. And then his big hit that he got was "This Is the Best Day of My Life." You know that song?

(Paul Kramer at 00:03:43) No. You know what? Unfortunately, my musical taste stopped about 1992.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:48) Oh, come on.

(Paul Kramer at 00:03:49) Well, no, I know a lot. I just don't know who it is. Like if you said, "Name a song from Dua Lipa," I'd be like, I know the name. I like what she does, but I couldn't tell you one name. I couldn't tell you a name of her song.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:05) So it's a song that was in a lot of movies, and it just swept. It was in the top songs for a year or two. Nice. And just pop culture. You've definitely heard it in a movie or something, but...

(Paul Kramer at 00:04:18) I'm sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:19) Yeah. He wasn't the band. He was the producer of them. He found them in Boston, and they were wanting to record an album. And he's like, yeah, come up to New York, we'll record something. And then it just took off.

(Paul Kramer at 00:04:34) Production, especially on the music side, you can tell a well-produced band and song. And I may not like the music, but the production, just the style of the production and the sound, that's really what I love. Whether I like the song or not is inconsequential, but you can tell how they've put it together and really added some nuances that take a song to the next level. I love high production value. I like garage band stuff too because that's what I grew up with. I'm a punk rocker at heart, but that high-quality production...

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:11) I love it. I like that you like the different genres of music because when I'm doing some drum stuff, I'll put on a '70s funk backtrack. Totally. There's just something about drumming like '70s drummer...

(Paul Kramer at 00:05:24) It's just over the top. I mean, I have my iWatch on, and I'll close a circle just playing three James Brown songs. There's no doubt about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:34) Oh, this is good. People are like, isn't this a technology podcast? Yeah, right? So that's your music hobby. Talk to me a little bit about what Changepoint is.

(Paul Kramer at 00:05:46) Changepoint is just a super fun software company. So we are focused on helping companies achieve better business outcomes, and we have three platform products: one focused on work management execution, Changepoint Project Portfolio Management; one on service automation called Changepoint SA; and then the product that I lead up is Changepoint Enterprise Architecture Management. And at the end of the day, we are focused on aligning strategy with execution. And the fun part of Changepoint, the story that I think gets me excited and gets the rest of the organization excited, is giving companies the ability to imagine what could be. This is where I'm at today. What could be? What changes do I need to make, or how do I need to react in the context of external situations? So you look at the unprecedented business environment we're in right now. Companies are making decisions that, well, yeah, did they have a business continuity plan? Totally. Did they ever think that they would likely have to leverage that? Probably not. So being able to react in real time to these unprecedented business environments and make decisions that benefit the customer, their employees, and enable them to keep executing on their strategy. That's the really fun stuff, and that's really what we focus on for when we say aligning strategy to execution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:28) So I read on the website, actually, when you go right to the Changepoint website, there's a callout to the, you know, your business continuity plan. So you're very explicit about that, so people can go read that. I was curious to know more about that just in general, like open discussion. So, you know, I personally, just to be transparent, didn't have a business continuity plan in the archives or ready to dust off if needed. Do a lot of companies—and I hate asking compound questions, I'm sorry about that—do you see a lot of companies that have these?

(Paul Kramer at 00:08:08) I don't know what a compound question is anyway, so ask them that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:13) Well, you know, I'll take a little aside here. When people ask multiple questions, that's the thing that's most frustrating. So, obviously, I'm new to the whole interviewing thing in the past couple years. But now when I watch interviews, I'm like, why ask two questions? It's so hard to answer two questions at once. So the first question, I'll be simple. Do you notice a lot of businesses having these plans?

(Paul Kramer at 00:08:40) Well, there's two answers to that question. Do they have the plans? Yes. It's likely in their head, though. It's likely in, you know, isolated tribes of siloed information all over the enterprise. So they do have a plan, whether it's codified and it's something that they can turn to right away—it's a crapshoot. And if they do have one, it's likely outdated or really didn't address the environment we're seeing right now. I mean, the business continuity here isn't a natural disaster like a tornado or hurricane and you lose your data center. It's, alright, how do I continue to scale my organization in a distributed environment? No one is gonna be working next to each other. Everyone is remote. How do I support some of these manual processes offline? That type of stuff, most business continuity plans didn't take into consideration. And, you know, when you go to our website, you're right, business continuity planning is timely given the environment that we're in, but that is only one use case in the context of enterprise architecture management and creating that sync or that linkage between strategy and execution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:05) And so, I want you to shed some more light because, well, I get to talk with a lot of different people that run large organizations. Myself, I haven't worked in an organization that is bigger than 250 people. So can you give me some background on what enterprise architecture management looks like? And then in your mind, when you're talking about strategy and execution, are these two different teams or one team that concepts are happening? Can you tell me, I guess the question I want to form is, how is it broken?

(Paul Kramer at 00:10:42) Yeah. So fundamentally, enterprise architecture management, at the end of the day, it's just an inventory. It's an inventory of what an enterprise does, how an enterprise does it, and then how does it allocate finite resources to deliver on whatever it does—make a widget, sell a service, what have you. So fundamentally, it's very simplistic. You're just counting things, and you're looking at how, for instance, an application may be related to a process, or a software technology may be related to a given product. So enterprise architecture, you just count those things and you start to map the relationship. That delta and what that inventory allows you to do is not only assess what do I have, but it can enable you to start to imagine what could I be or what could I do with respect to the things that I have. That alignment of strategy to execution is super important and is often overlooked. Not from a—people think about strategy, but our definition of strategy is the allocation of finite resources to deliver a specified outcome. And a business has finite resources: people, money, time, all of these different things. How do you allocate those finite resources to deliver on your vision? Maybe Changepoint, our CEO wakes up one day and says, you know what, we're gonna be an app company. All we are gonna do is build apps, and we're gonna go into the service business. And what enterprise architecture allows you to do is assess that pivot. Do you have the capacity to do to make that type of pivot, and what are the resulting impacts? So that's really the forward-facing part of enterprise architecture. You know, when we—so kind of bring it back to business continuity planning, you said do a lot of companies have it? Yes. They know what widget to move where, what process, who's on first, who's on second. They can change all their routing for their call centers. But what this recent business climatic, well, actually, world calamity has introduced is business continuity planning didn't necessarily address how are we gonna collaborate as an organization. Yes, there's Zoom. Yes, there's email, and you have some collaborative other tools out there like Slack so you can have conversations. But how can you bring to scale the ability for individuals to affect the enterprise, to affect decisions that are gonna be made that, you know, you don't have the water cooler conversations anymore or the coffee conversation. Those are all gone right now. You have to get on Zoom. And really, what we try to talk about and what we focus on delivering in the context of enterprise architecture management is how do you leverage that collective experience, that finite resource, the most important part of your business, your human capital, and arm them with tools so that they can help affect change, whether directly or indirectly. And think of it really from how do you crowdsource information in an enterprise that's not isolated to email or SharePoint, you know, a lot of antiquated technologies that, candidly, the millennial generation doesn't even like to participate in that world, and they want to be able to have a voice or some context or alignment to what's going on at the higher level. So that's really what we try to humanize—those enterprise assets, those enterprise resources—and almost give them a personality, for lack of a better term.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:41) I like that. And you're right, as the generations come through, we're just constantly redefining how we work, what we work on. I mean, I was talking about this with my wife the other day. It's like we've always just been in a constant state of change. It's just always been changing. Like there's never been a time when it's a certain way for a long period of time. It just every generation changes. There's new music. Right? But there's different styles. There's different trends. There's different businesses. We're just in this constant state of change. And so what are you—yeah, you guys have changed the name. What services are doing well for you right now?

(Paul Kramer at 00:15:36) Really, if you look at the three pillars of our business—work management execution, project portfolio management, service automation, and enterprise architecture management—they're naturally built to support chaos and really bring calmness to that chaotic state. So across the board, all of our businesses are performing well. Granted, are we on the growth trajectory that we were seeing, you know, coming out of our fiscal Q4 at the end of March? No. But from a business standpoint, you know, we are a profitable software company. We are continuing to grow. We're just not growing at the clip that we were growing prior to COVID-19. So we're really happy with where our business stands right now. And we have a mantra right now: selling doesn't help, helping sells. So really what we're doing as an organization is really getting very intimate with our customers and really digging in and trying to figure out where can we be of service to you? How can we help you? This isn't a transaction. We are building a relationship. So let's not worry about any commercial transaction. Let us dig in and help you solve your problems. You had 100 projects that you were gonna focus on, and now you need to winnow those down to you can only do 20. How do you prioritize those 20? Which ones should they be? The ones that you've identified, are they aligned with the strategy, where you wanna go? So we are really just digging in and getting very, you know, almost sitting in our customer's lap, for all intents and purposes, and really getting to understand their business. What are the fears that they have? What, you know, really, what fears do they have, and how can we help them overcome that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:29) I have never heard that. "Selling doesn't help, helping sells." That is like...

(Paul Kramer at 00:17:33) I made it up. I stole it from our CEO. He says it all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:38) Are you guys a publicly traded company?

(Paul Kramer at 00:17:44) We're not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:45) Goddamn. Whenever I meet really great people, I know that there's other great people at the company. And then after—I don't think I've ever shared this before, so a candid moment—but after I go buy shares of their company, when I'm like, oh, they have great people, great culture, I'm like, I'll just hold a long position on this for a decade.

(Paul Kramer at 00:18:01) Yeah. No. We're a unique software company. I mean, we're cash flow positive. We're profitable. We have EBITDA. We're owned by a private equity firm, and they've been awesome to work with. They're very patient, and they've let our CEO and his leadership team really navigate and traverse the business. They're very hands off. So it's been an amazing experience. We are, I would say, a mid-size software company, and it's really nice. I mean, we're a close knit bunch of people, and collaboration is super important. Not collaboration banging on the keyboard, but how are we gonna solve problems? Let's imagine what could be. How do we get there? We can't get there today, but how do we get there over time? And how can we bring our customers along in that journey? And while we're bringing them along in that journey, how can we help them? Because if we're not helping them, they're not gonna be interested in anything that we're doing. We could have the greatest widget in the world or piece of software, but if it's not adding value to them personally, not just at an enterprise level, but personal value. If they don't have an intimate relationship with our different software applications, we're not gonna succeed. So we're very, very not only customer intimate, but very user-centric with respect to how can we help them solve the problems that they experience day in and day out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:31) And I found that people that are founders that it gets so cemented into them, this concept, that it just becomes something that's inseparable. It's something I've been learning over the past couple years. I knew it in product, right, that you have to keep the understand the customer and from that standpoint. But as I grew as an entrepreneur and in business, I realized that—first of all, sales is simply helping. Right? I used to think of it like used car salesman. I realized, nope. That's not how it actually works. So I got a better understanding of how sales works in the past couple years, but I've also really—what I guess the question I wanna ask for you is, do you have an entrepreneurial background?

(Paul Kramer at 00:20:22) Yes. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:24) Yeah. And so you learned a lot of this stuff by starting your company. And then did you actually—did you get acquired by Changepoint?

(Paul Kramer at 00:20:33) Correct. Yes, sir. We were acquired in April 2015.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:38) Okay. And what are the big takeaways from that?

(Paul Kramer at 00:20:43) You know, it is quite a chasm to cross, I'll say. To be an entrepreneur, to get acquired, which is something you always—you know, as an entrepreneur, it just validates what you're doing. And then to make that transition into this isn't my business anymore, but this business is a part of me. And being able to make that—and you said it. That emotional separation is the hardest part. You know, I can act very transactional and be like, yep, that's the process that we follow. But that emotional separation, you know, candidly took a long, long time. It's very—you play music. I mean, from my perspective, a band or a musician, they're as entrepreneurial as any software mogul that's out there. You know, they write this music. They shop it around. They're trying to get people that'd be interested in what they're doing. And, you know, that experience that I had playing in bands and doing a little touring and making some albums, that just got me excited about I love sharing ideas, and I get emotionally attached to them. And I think the hardest part from the acquisition—you know, when Changepoint acquired us, a lot of amazing things happened. One, there was unique synergy. Two, they brought scale that we didn't necessarily have as a smaller company, and they brought some process. I mean, they really brought some order to the chaos of a startup. But detaching emotionally from the product and how we interact with each other, you know, that took a little bit of time. And really, I don't wanna say the culture evolved. Changepoint's culture evolved, and we had to adopt some of their cultural habits. And candidly, they adopted a lot of our habits. They liked that we were a super cool technology recognized in the industry, moved really, really fast, very small team that could crank out a lot of work very, very quickly. But when you start getting pummeled with a lot of customers, that, you know, small net approach doesn't necessarily work, and you have to scale. And the emotional detachment is tightly coupled to building trust. And you build trust over time. It's not instantaneous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:06) That is something I, a hundred percent, agree with. Now when you—was this your first entrepreneurial endeavor?

(Paul Kramer at 00:23:15) No. I had two before that. One, a nice big crash and burn during the dot-com, the dot bomb, and then just a little small one prior to that. So I've always done—been in—I grew up. My father was an entrepreneur. He used to own a bunch of machine shops. So I've grown up in that. That's just what you become. You start your own business. You don't work for someone else. You just start your own business. And I had, you know, some great employment opportunities, you know, in between that and learned a ton. So but I ultimately—being an entrepreneur in a business like Changepoint is super fun because I'm almost more of an evangelist. I mean, I manage the enterprise architecture management business, but I get to focus a lot of time too on what could be—what could Changepoint look like? What could it be? How can we take our customers to the next level? And that's super exciting. And I—you know, 90% of my day is spent just collaborating with customers and trying to figure out what—creating a relationship so they can get to a point of vulnerability where they'll say, you know what? This is really what's bugging me. This is really where we're having problems. And then to have that candid dialogue to say, that's super interesting. We're not focused on that, but maybe here, I'm gonna point you in a direction to someone that might be able to help you. But you mentioned this other thing. Let's drill into this a little bit more, and let's see if we can help you there. So that's one of the great things about Changepoint. We really are—we are focused on helping our customers. And if we have a product that fits the need or capability rather that fits the need, then we're gonna really create that intimate relationship. But if it's the, you know, wrong opportunity, we'll be very candid with our customers. We don't want them to stick a square into a round hole. We want their—every touch that they have with us, whether they become a customer or not, we want that to be an experience that can't be replicated. And software is easily replicated. You can replicate it. I mean, someone could make Changepoint EAM and likely may be doing it in their garage, but that customer intimate approach, that is not easily replicated. The experience that we have as an organization aligning execution or strategy to execution is second to none. We have, you know, very deep expertise in the ability to execute big ideas and bringing those to market.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:56) I was having a conversation yesterday with a gentleman named Larry Robinson, and we were talking about—he introduced me to this concept of budget allocation in the context of running a run-growth-transform, like RGT.

(Paul Kramer at 00:26:13) Run-growth-transform. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:14) So this is something that's an industry-known thing?

(Paul Kramer at 00:26:19) And it's pretty—it's common in budget—yes. Definitely in budget allocation. But if you look at enterprise architecture, you are looking at the different parts of your business and you're making decisions. How am I gonna allocate these finite resources? Am I running this part of the business and that's just to sustain? Do I wanna grow it? In anything I'm growing, I'm gonna throw more investment at it, and hopefully, it's aligned to my strategy because it's gonna help me get to where I wanna go, or am I gonna transform it? And if I wanna transform it, I'm gonna stick a little bit more money in that. So yeah. And it's a great paradigm to really focus your attention, and it's a great paradigm. You were talking to the Shopify guy. I really enjoyed that interview. If you think about it in the context of 30-60-90, you know, the run the business is that 30%. That grow the business is that 60%. That transform the business, that's the 90%. I wanna get into the details and understand what are we gonna do to transform because that'll ultimately support what we wanna do from a growth perspective. So that just gives context to the decisions that you're gonna make, and it enables not only stakeholders, but, you know, everyone in the enterprise to understand, alright, this is the focus of the—this is the focus of the business. And if you're working on the 30% or the run side, that doesn't mean you're not important to the business. It really means you gotta keep this thing going. If you're working on the grow and the transform, it all just provides context and a lens of how am I gonna engage with the stakeholder or other team members as it relates to where we are in that budget allocation paradigm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:04) You're very intelligent. Do you write at all?

(Paul Kramer at 00:28:09) I am—I would love to write. I have a lot of ideas that I—I have a lot of 20 pages that I haven't finished. But, yeah, I enjoy writing. I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:21) Do you publish your stuff like blog posts? And—

(Paul Kramer at 00:28:24) No. My cohorts would like to see that more. And, you know what? It's one of those things. I like to do it because I like to do it when I have to do it. It's not that I won't do it. It just takes longer. I wrote a couple of poems the other day, and it was just literally, oh, I got an hour, and I'm in between meetings. I just need to take a break, and I just banged out a couple of things. But it's more cathartic for me. I don't mind if people read what I write. It's just really more of a cathartic exercise and—and candidly helps me—I don't want—it helps really deepen any experiences that I have. That's what I like about writing, is it really creates that reflective opportunity to really dig into an experience and then look at how you could apply that experience, you know, in the context of business to solve a problem or in the context of a relationship, how to show up differently. So that's why I like to write.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:24) I like to—I did a songwriting class book program thing a few years ago, and so I went through this—I think it was a 30-day challenge where you write—you set a timer for 10 minutes and you write.

(Paul Kramer at 00:29:39) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:40) Yeah. It definitely improved and, you know, there's something to be said for when you're—and this can be tied back to technology or career and improvement, but there's something to be said for specific improvement, like, scheduled improvement, and then spontaneous improvement and—and I don't think it's one or the other. I think it's a portfolio of both. But, yeah, I have found that writing—because I've written some poem things too. Like, well, I—for lyric writing, you can basically write poems, and then they can turn into lyrics. That's one of the exercises I went through. But that process was actually pretty unique because first of all, you've never heard it—I've never heard it in business before.

(Paul Kramer at 00:30:23) Yeah. Right. I'll write a business haiku or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:29) But when you do, it's just a different muscle in your brain. It's a different part. And it's pretty—it's a pretty interesting—I'm no stranger of exploring weird areas because I find that to be an interesting part of life. And so when people come up with different ideas, I'll, you know, try them and see if I gain anything from the experience. But that would be a fun exercise, a business haiku. All right?

(Paul Kramer at 00:30:57) Yeah. Right? I like to do anything that helps just shaping the experience and create, you know, refined context. Context is on a continuum. Right? And as you get deeper and deeper and more intimate, you know, your lens gets bigger and you start to see things more clearly. And that's why I appreciate the space that I am in from an enterprise architecture management standpoint. You start at a 30,000-foot view, and you can get very, very deep, and you have a lot of people participating and providing that context. And to me, that's everything. Context supports the ability to be customer intimate and know a lot about your customer. Not only Changepoint to, you know, our customers, but internally as a business. Every person has a different stakeholder or is a customer to someone else. You know, someone is consuming what they're doing. How do you evolve that? How do you create a customer intimate relationship in that context? I'm a developer. My customer is a business user. How do I get customer intimate in that context? And how do I create a level of transparency and an air of vulnerability where I can, you know, reduce that gap, that chasm between business and IT? And that fundamentally is really what we're focused on from an enterprise architecture management standpoint, and we think it's that type of relationship that accelerates that, you know, strategy to execution alignment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:44) So let's say people are listening. They hear that. They say, hey. I think that I have a gap or I wanna analyze my gap. That is a service that they could come to you and discuss.

(Paul Kramer at 00:32:55) That is a—definitely. They can leverage our enterprise architecture management software to support the discovery of that gap and then really take different pivots. If I do this, does it close the gap? If I do this, does it open the gap? How do I—you know, do I move it an inch, or do I move closer to my goal exponentially? Definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:22) So you have software for this?

(Paul Kramer at 00:33:24) Exactly. We are a software company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:26) So I could take your software—

(Paul Kramer at 00:33:28) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:28) And I could—and you guys could sit next to me and we kinda show me how—like, I put this information in about the business—

(Paul Kramer at 00:33:35) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36) And it could help me drive the strategic direction of the business by using the software.

(Paul Kramer at 00:33:42) It can help in—I don't wanna say drive because it's not like push button Amazon, buy it now. That's what everyone wants, but it can help you and it will help inform you, are you aligned with where you wanna go? It will enable you to ask better questions because my—our belief is if you're asking better questions, you're gonna get better results. It's the, you know, the lean mentality. Ask why seven times. You know, if my—I—that's just an obsession to me. If someone says it doesn't work because we did—you know, we had too much load. Okay. Great. Why did we have too much load? Well, we had 500 users. You know? I think asking better questions gets you better results. And at the end of the day, what Changepoint Enterprise Architecture Management software does is enable anyone in the enterprise to ask a better question. We're about creating enterprise advisors. Our perspective is stop hiring the Deloittes, the McKinseys, these fancy consulting firms out there. You have a valuable resource throughout your enterprise. Leverage them to be your advisor. So when we—and I can, you know, link this back to that business continuity plan that you were talking about. And were businesses ready for this?

(Paul Kramer at 00:35:06) They could cut over and do all the things that they needed to do from a physical standpoint. But they have a gigantic opportunity right now to leverage the collective experience of their entire business to help them determine, are they aligned with where they want to go from a strategic perspective? Where are the gaps? Every individual is looking at gaps day in and day out, and they document it, maybe in an Excel spreadsheet, a Post-it note. And ChangePoint EAM gives everyone the ability to, for lack of a better term, share their thoughts about something in the business, a piece of software, a given process.

(Paul Kramer at 00:35:50) And as you crowdsource that, you get closer to identifying where are the opportunities to make a change and really get to where you want to go. That's what's super exciting is aggregating that collective experience. You almost think that hive mentality to really—and as a stakeholder, I can look back and look and see, I am aligned. And my most valuable resources are telling me aligned. Or I could look at what's going on and be like, we are really off base. Yes. Everyone has a job, and they're super grateful, but we got people doing—you know, the right doesn't know what the left's doing. How do we get that alignment?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:34) I like that. I think you guys are doing meaningful work.

(Paul Kramer at 00:36:38) It's really—it's cool. It's sexy. I know that may not be a very good word to use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:46) This is the best word. Yeah.

(Paul Kramer at 00:36:46) It's super exciting. I mean, I get geeked out. Here, truly, as a stakeholder, if I was a CEO or a CTO, what's going to keep me up at night are the things that I don't know. That's what's going to keep me up at night. What I know, big deal. If I know it, that means everyone knows it. I'm just not that smart. But what I don't know, that's going to prevent me from either being intimate with my customer. It's going to create an impact to the business that may have a ripple effect to other parts of the business. And enterprise architecture management, a core component of it is, let's identify what you have, what you do.

(Paul Kramer at 00:37:27) Let's assess does what you have and what you do—is it adding value? And if it adds value, is it aligned with where we want to go? And those are four easy questions to answer, assuming I know everything I need to know. So enterprise architecture management helps me find those blind spots and really focus on those things that I don't know.

(Paul Kramer at 00:37:50) And the beauty of that is oftentimes, that's where the magic moment is. That's where that moment is where you're like, didn't know that. And now using your budget allocation paradigm—grow, run, transform—you didn't know this. Now you can apply a paradigm to say, let's ramp this up. I had no idea that this was in the business either as an impact or a benefit. Let's run towards that. That is the stuff that literally it gives me chills. I love hearing our clients say, never knew this before. It's just such an awesome experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:27) At the core, it's like you're selling certainty almost, right, which is important. Like, it will—and I'll give context to that too. So—

(Paul Kramer at 00:38:40) Did you see my hesitation?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:42) Yeah. I was like, you're like, no, no, no. I want to give context to where I'm coming from with that. I read this great article from Tony Robbins about psychology, and there were like six or seven core human needs, like core drivers inside of humans. And one of them was certainty. Like, that's a core driver. And some of us have higher needs for certainty, and some of us have lower needs for certainty, and it can ebb and flow like the seasons and the weather. But when I try to make sense of things as a carbon-based life form, I try to always boil stuff down, like, where does this fit in the portfolio for humans?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:20) And what people want, what we desire is we desire a certain level of certainty. And we go through these exercises in our business, whether there are meetings or frameworks like the run, transform budget allocations, things like this. We leverage these tools, these cerebral tools and procedural tools in order to gain a higher level of certainty. And rightfully so, we should. I want people to have that as a core driver. Obviously, you can take it to an extreme and it can get too much, but one of the—what this leads me to a question, because we were talking about some frameworks or some acronyms for the budget allocation. Are there any favorites of yours in this strategy alignment?

(Paul Kramer at 00:40:10) From an acronym standpoint?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:12) Yeah. Like, are there any ones that get thrown around a lot in the alignment area or no?

(Paul Kramer at 00:40:16) No. I mean, they're—you know, one we use a lot, it's from Gartner. It's tolerate, invest, migrate, eliminate. It's very—it's almost identical to run, grow, transform. I wouldn't say I have a favorite acronym, but what I'd like to pick up, and I like what you say now about certainty. And really, fundamentally, I think that is at the core of ChangePoint enterprise architecture. And I, as an employee, want to have a level of certainty that what I'm doing is meaningful and has an impact in the business. And that fundamentally is at the core of ChangePoint enterprise architecture. We give everyone the ability, whether you're a developer—if a secretary had access, whatever it is—we give everyone the ability to participate at the enterprise level so they can start to see, does what I do, is it impactful? Is it aligned with where I want to go?

(Paul Kramer at 00:41:28) And if I can answer yes to those questions, I have a level of certainty that I didn't have. And especially when we're all working in these isolated environments right now. I mean, I'm in my studio. My level of certainty goes away. There is just emotional apprehension with distance and the ability to interact in a different form and crowdsource not only what do I do, but what the business does.

(Paul Kramer at 00:41:58) That starts to give me a level of certainty. Or like that CTO conversation, it highlights what I don't know, and it gives me an opportunity to learn more or to pivot and make some changes. And those—you know, think about that level of interaction hundreds or thousands of times across the day in an enterprise. The metadata and the insight that you can glean from those different individual transactions, it's monumental. So my ability to identify gaps, see blind spots, test alignment, look at the impact of change, now I can do that in real time.

(Paul Kramer at 00:42:42) It is not a six-month, twelve-month exercise where I have an external consulting firm coming in. It's something I can do all day, every day now once I make the decision as an enterprise to say and really put some oomph behind what they say their resources are their most important asset, then turn them into enterprise advisors, leverage that collective experience. I mean, that's really—that's the wall we hit from an enterprise architecture management standpoint. Because like anything that is super awesome and super cool, there is a behavioral change component to it. And organizations that are more actualized are open to that behavioral change. Organizations that are more fear-based, it's a bigger hump for them to get over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:34) So I'm struggling. I want to see it, right? Like, I like this idea. Do you have videos or screenshots on the website? Like, how do you help your customers that are saying—like, when they're new, like, let's just pretend this is like a first interaction with us. And I'm telling you, like, I want to see it. How do you answer that question with your customers?

(Paul Kramer at 00:43:57) Well, definitely, of course, you can go to changepoint.com, and you can look at our enterprise architecture management solution or other two solutions. The way that I would describe it best if someone says, what does it do? Imagine Facebook for the enterprise, but really, my friends are processes, applications, technologies, markets, products, strategies, and I'm creating a dimensional map or relationship of those things. So anytime I click on it, I can see their friends and all the things that they're related. So I can traverse a graph, and I start to get this graphical representation of my enterprise. That's what we aspire to do from an enterprise architecture management standpoint. We are trying to turn the, what we would say, old-school enterprise architecture management approach on its head. It is really about leveraging the collective experience to create that dynamic organic enterprise view so that no matter where you're at, you can see how—if I change this, what's the resulting impact? And it requires—if you think about a business, there's a lot of bits and bytes in the business.

(Paul Kramer at 00:45:19) So you can auto-discover a lot of information. Kind of like when you get a new printer, it can auto-discover the Wi-Fi and the network you're on. There's a lot of software that can do that. But using that printer example that discovers the Wi-Fi or the network you're on, that printer can't discover what's around it. Boy, I'm in a credenza. This credenza's got a desk. It's in an office that's next to a kitchen, and they're all seemingly related even though it seems isolated. We help enrich that picture. So we can take auto-discovered information from other third-party products, and then the collective experience starts to enrich that information and say, yes, I have an application.

(Paul Kramer at 00:46:03) That application supports procure to pay or customer transaction. This transaction is supported by a customer service agent. That customer service agent is in Torrance, California. So really creating that dynamic map to create this graphical representation of the business. How can it not get you chills? Right? I mean, it—but it is super exciting. And when it really works, it can bring tears to your eyes because you have the collective experience of your business chiming in and saying, this is what this thing does. And they're just—it's on a continuum. It gets so data-rich, and it no longer is metadata.

(Paul Kramer at 00:46:53) It is an insight in and of itself. We—you know, that is really where the magic is, is when data just becomes an insight. It's still data, but contextually, it's so rich because it has so many relationships. It's almost like you've created a painting just looking at one thing because you can see everything around it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:15) So you have this abstraction of the organization, its processes in a digital way. And then there's a social component too where we could actually go in and we could—you could be looking at the model, I could be looking at the model, and I could leave a comment on different areas. Is it like that?

(Paul Kramer at 00:47:32) Yeah. It's very close. I—yes. I would say that conceptually is very good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:37) Okay. Yeah. I'm trying to build the mental—

(Paul Kramer at 00:47:40) No, no, no. That's super—that's very accurate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:44) It sounds so useful because, you know, even as my business was growing, I was looking for things like how do we do process management or how do I visualize the process in which all of these things happen because, you know, I'm an engineer, so I want to see it—

(Paul Kramer at 00:48:00) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:00) —on a flow. And I found that the tools were pretty old for that, because only some of the massive enterprises were really doing it, and I was kind of blown away by how it's not happening at smaller companies. And so that's probably another conversation. But what I found was that the tools weren't really what I wanted to do. And the reason why I'm kind of excited now is I feel like your tool is a blue ocean. Like, I didn't know I wanted it to look like that, but I feel like that's what I would want the tool to look like, and that's how I would want to interact with it. Are you guys seeing that with your customers? Are you like a blue ocean here?

(Paul Kramer at 00:48:37) Right. We are like a blue ocean, and that's where the customer intimate philosophy becomes really important. Yeah. I'll—you know, how do you swim a blue ocean? One stroke at a time. You can't just jump across it, right? And so, really, you can do a lot of different things with enterprise architecture management. What we try to do—what we do, not try, what we do organizationally is to figure out, all right, we're going to get across the ocean one stroke at a time. Let's focus our attention. So our implementation methodology is a bunch of focused sprints. I mean, what—and again, enterprise architecture, project portfolio management, service automation—how can we do quick two-week sprints to get you to where you want to go? And then it does—it evolves very—it's very organic.

(Paul Kramer at 00:49:28) I mean, it may start out with five users and explode. I mean, our first customer, we sold to one person and sold one license. And within a year, we're at a thousand active registered users. And now, you know, they're at 6,500 active registered users that are, you know, on a daily basis entering something someone else didn't know about the business, about a capability or a process, about an integration, about a piece of data, about a new application, about a strategy. And as you continue to make those contributions, you're just enriching that whole enterprise graph.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:07) You're blowing my mind. This is actually really cool.

(Paul Kramer at 00:50:12) Everyone, I would kill to be cool. So I'll send that to my kids and say, hey, this young gun said your old man's cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:22) No. But like, I get to hear a lot of products. I get to hear a lot of things, you know, and I get to see a lot of stuff. But I feel like this is going—that you guys are just at the beginning. You're just at day one. Once the enterprises hear about this and see it and as you, you know, get your first license and land and expand, this is going to be something that's really big long term.

(Paul Kramer at 00:50:45) Yes. Yes. We are—there is a fundamental change happening in the different disciplines that support strategy to execution. There's a fundamental change, and we are at the forefront of that. And it's super, super exciting. It is super exciting. The nice thing about being at the forefront of it is everything that we just talked about, we can actually do. I'm super excited about how do we even take it further and really accelerate this fundamental change that is occurring within enterprises around, you know, how do you create an army of enterprise advisors so that everyone is focused on the end result, whatever that may be? And that is what is super, super exciting. I mean, we're talking about making companies hyper-productive.

(Paul Kramer at 00:51:40) If the computer was the introduction of making people productive, this is that intellectual capacity, and that is the hardest thing to codify and capture and to be able to get insight into. And so that is what is so super exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:01) So—I don't know if this is helpful for you, but this is actually a trend I'm noticing. And I don't know if it relates at all. But I'm hearing a lot of people talk more about how they connect subject matter experts within their organization. So like, whether it's around a specific technology, I hear a lot about that in engineering teams, like, you know, oh, we're doing a Slack channel, or we have a group that meets once or whatever. And like, this group will know everything about, you know, Redis or databases.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:32) And so if other parts of the organization need to know about databases, they could come talk to this group because we're inside. But everyone's kind of doing it a little bit differently. And I like to watch patterns emerge because, well, that's how you profit as an entrepreneur. But I like to watch the patterns emerge, and I'm definitely seeing people are asking that question: How do I get the smart people, the knowledge, the subject matter experts, essentially, to identify and then be available for other parts of the organization? Because it makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:09) It's actually surprising that there isn't more refined way to do it already.

(Paul Kramer at 00:53:14) Yeah. And one of the exercises of participating with the ChangePoint Enterprise Architecture Management solution, our platform, you are, one, announcing your subject matter expertise. It's very identifiable, and you can start to see, as an example, how that subject matter expertise relates to the rest of the enterprise. And it's very discoverable now. Now I don't need to create centers of excellence for, you know, Red Hat or a center of excellence for the procure-to-pay process.

(Paul Kramer at 00:53:49) It's discoverable in the context of ChangePoint Enterprise Architecture Management, and more importantly, I can start to interact with it at a personal level to assess impact, benefit. How do I advance something? Or just discover other like minds. Jeez, Joel is a—he likes to play, he likes to code on the Unity platform. Had no idea. I'm using the Unity platform to render in 3D a new process or something to that effect. That's the type of—you can ask a question, you can discover it, and then interrogate that, and the end result is an insight that you didn't have prior.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:34) Yes. A hundred percent. I definitely see the center of excellence is changing from how we did them before to what they will be, because to your point, you know, I could be hobbyist creator of video games, but you would never know that by my job title, and I happen to have an interest in that. Right? And then that could be useful to someone else at the organization. But in order to get those things out there, I think we'll see more of that. I think we'll see more of, like—and I guess a visualization that's coming to mind is like a video game where you have all the stat bars and the strengths.

(Paul Kramer at 00:55:15) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:16) I think we'll see more of that with our employees, not because of a negative, right, of analyzing them being overreaching, but because of a positive. Because knowing what the interests are, you know, if I'm forming a new team in this part of the organization, I might recruit internally through people that already know our product or our culture and have that skill set. So I think there will become—there will be in the future, there will be more transparency about the different team members and what their strengths are.

(Paul Kramer at 00:55:48) Well, the interesting thing about what you just said too is the millennials, the younger team members, that type of information to them is, like you said, it's not a negative. It's context. This is who I am. You know, I have a maximum shot factor of whatever it is. You know, if you think about it from a—if playing on Discord, it just informs you on, alright, this is how I'm gonna interact. This is how I can create that, you know, employee-to-employee intimacy or, you know, in some essence, it's super vulnerable to show that information, but that vulnerability provides greater context for the enterprise. So we are seeing our customers that have a younger generation, millennials and younger as their core employees, they're hyper-productive in ChangePoint EAM because they want to, at the end of the day, to see, does what I do, does it matter? Does it affect or is it impacting the business? Am I moving it forward? How do I relate to everything else? I don't want to be just an employee number or a member of this team. I'm the member of a collective, and there's a lot of people in here. And that's the exciting stuff that—the willingness to make that leap of faith and say, put your knowledge out there. Not your knowledge in the context of I'm a J2EE developer. I know Spring, any of that type of stuff. But to say, this is what I'm working on, and what I'm working on is related to this process. And then when you click on that process, you're like, that process is related to the strategy of, you know, find a cure for COVID-19. I had no freaking idea. Are you kidding me? And the enthusiasm and the empowerment, all of a sudden, what I do has different context, and I can start to traverse all these relationships that I didn't have any line of sight to before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:53) Yeah. It builds meaning and—

(Paul Kramer at 00:57:54) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:55) Purpose. And that's incredible.

(Paul Kramer at 00:57:57) A hundred percent. Totally. It helps in, you know, that individual, what's my "why"? That's, you know, blow Simon Sinek out of the water. Steal his line right there. Yeah. You know, what's my "why"? It helps affirm what is my "why."

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:15) I can never get that guy's last name right. I think they say Sinek. Sinek. I don't know.

(Paul Kramer at 00:58:20) I can't either.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:21) But he's smart. I listened to him talk a little bit. He, like, recorded a company meeting he had about the coronavirus and put it out there.

(Paul Kramer at 00:58:29) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:30) That's on YouTube. You can scan it. It's just like a ten-minute call with his employees about, you know, making the change because most of his revenue was from in-person speaking.

(Paul Kramer at 00:58:39) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:39) You know, like, workshops. And so you just have to change the organization—

(Paul Kramer at 00:58:43) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:44) If you have to to stay relevant. Dude, this is an awesome conversation. You're a fantastic person.

(Paul Kramer at 00:58:50) Joel, thanks. It was—it's fun. I was—I got up, and my wife goes, boy, you're awfully antsy. And I get up crazy early, and I'm like, I'm just excited to talk to someone that I don't talk to all the time because we've been in shelter-in-place for so long. I mean, I think we're on week six. And, thankfully, we all get along, but it was just like, alright, here's a new face. I'm so—I truly, I'm super grateful for the opportunity, ChangePoint is, and it's been a hoot riffing and collaborating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:23) Was there any areas that we didn't cover that we wanna cover here?

(Paul Kramer at 00:59:28) No. I—you know what? I didn't come in with really—the goal was just to have some fun, share experiences and really no agenda. It was just to come in, talk about the cool stuff we're doing, learn from you, and I wanted to be like a coffee shop. So it was awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:49) Thank you. That's, like, exactly the purpose of this show. And then you're primarily in Minnesota?

(Paul Kramer at 00:59:56) Yes. I'm based out of Minnesota. Most of ChangePoint is—we're a global organization, but our corporate offices are in Seattle, Washington.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:08) But you spend most of your time in Minnesota?

(Paul Kramer at 01:00:11) Minnesota. Correct. We have a small group of resources here. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:15) Well, I find people I wanna, like, hang out with in person or something, I put them on the travel sheet. And then whenever there's an opportunity and I'm nearby, I would take, like, a flight or just come say hello if I'm in the city.

(Paul Kramer at 01:00:28) Anytime. We'd love to have you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:30) Paul, this is fantastic.

(Paul Kramer at 01:00:32) Joel, thanks for the opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:34) Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

(Paul Kramer at 01:00:36) Thank you. Have a great Friday.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:38) You too. Thanks, buddy.

(Paul Kramer at 01:00:39) Rock on, man. Be good.