Workflow baselining is the practice of documenting and analyzing how a process actually works before you change it. In security work, that means mapping the real sequence of approvals, handoffs, system actions, exceptions, and manual overrides, not just the policy version on paper.
This matters because attackers often exploit broken or unclear workflows. A phishing or business email compromise attempt may succeed by abusing an approval chain, a help-desk reset process, or a purchasing step that was never reviewed. Baselining helps defenders spot weak controls, duplicate steps, and unusual dependencies, and it gives them a reference point for detecting abnormal behavior later. It is also important before automation: if you automate a risky process without understanding it first, you may simply make bad decisions faster. In practice, teams use baselining to support process mining, improve segregation of duties, and design stronger, simpler controls.