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In today's developed economies, the significant nuances in employment concern interactions: the searching, monitoring, and coordinating required to manage the exchange of goods and services. Since 1997, extensive McKinsey research on jobs in many industries has revealed that globalization, specialization, and new technologies are making interactions far more pervasive in developed economies. Currently, jobs that involve participating in interactions rather than extracting raw materials or making finished goods account for more than 80 percent of all employment in the United States. And jobs involving the most complex type of interactions - those requiring employees to analyze information, grapple with ambiguity, and solve problems - make up the fastest-growing segment.

This shift toward more complex interactions has dramatic implications for how companies organize and operate.

...

The article that follows, "The next revolution in interactions," shows that the shift from transactional to tacit interactions requires companies to think differently about how to improve performance - and about their technology investments. Moreover, the rise of tacit occupations opens up the possibility that companies can again create capabilities and advantages that rivals can't easily duplicate.

("The next revolution in interactions")

There are a number of collaborative activities that go beyond workflow and knowledge management, which I call human interaction management, and that is going to be the next envelope pushed in the whole BPM space.

(interview for CIO Magazine Australia, September 2005)

Today's greatest business challenge is to offer total experiences that delight your customers, experiences that exceed their expectations. It's no longer viable to offer commodities, or just the best products or services. Companies must now open a two-way dialog with their customers in order to meet their needs throughout the consumption process, for they don't want your products and services in and of themselves, they want solutions to their needs. In today's fiercely competitive business environment, you must provide the complete experience that delights each and every customer. If you don't do that, you won't be able to compete for the future. If you do do that, you will need the support of the Human Interaction Management System, the breakthrough that changes the rules of business, the breakthrough that changes your relationships with both almighty customers, and the trading partners you must band together with to meet the needs of your present and future customers.

(foreword to "Human Interactions: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management")

The shortcomings of workflow - the narrow focus of each process, limited systems integration capability, inability to cater for change to or interaction between work streams, and so on - have led to new developments over the past five years, many coming under the banner of Business Process Management (BPM). Every major IT vendor now offers BPM software, though much of it is workflow or application integration with some BPM lipstick applied. This isn't meant to downplay the importance of current BPM solutions, for application-to-application integration, rules-driven workflow and real-time distributed transaction management are vital. And they are, in no way, trivial undertakings, but very complex endeavors. That's why BPM solutions providers place so much emphasis on Web services and service-oriented architectures as means of grappling with the complexity of system-to-system interactions. As a result, most of today's BPM solutions can take care of 80% of the routine, predetermined system-to-system scenarios with predefined workflow and inter-application transaction management. Such capabilities are needed to help a company put its "house in order" with application integration. But they don't directly support the way people actually accomplish their work.

What's needed is dedicated support for dynamic human-to-human interactions-that cannot be preordained or preprogrammed they way system-to-system interactions are. Further, it's the human-driven business processes that are the very heart of business process management. ... Human Interaction Management shows how to model all human work processes in a way that allows us to support them properly with software. Software support can make it far easier to participate in, measure, and facilitate processes that not only involve multiple players, but also evolve continuously throughout their lifetime-as they do in the messy real world of business.

("The Coming IT Flip Flop - and the Emergence of Human Interaction Management Systems")

Human Interactions: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management (Harrison-Broninski, Meghan-Kiffer Press, 2005)
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This book offers a refreshingly different perspective on BPM. Instead of the thinly veiled system approach of many other books Keith reminds us that managing and controlling processes is what we are ultimately trying to achieve. He also reminds us that whatever people may say or think the fact is that most work processes (and the hardest ones to control) occur between people (rather than between computer systems). The book puts forward some very powerful ideas to support these new ways of thinking about processes and the systems that support them. These suggestions and arguments are supported by a great deal of thought and theory.

If Geary Rummler is to be remembered for "Managing the White Space" on the organization chart then surely Keith will hope to become known as the man who set forward the agenda for "Managing the White Space" in the process map!

The central idea of the book is that the issue is less to do with understanding and automating individual processes and more to do with managing and controlling the literally thousands of processes that go to make up an organisation. This of course cannot be carried out effectively without fully understanding and managing the Human Interactions of which most work is comprised. As Keith points out "Many organizations have yet to realize that they are sleepwalking into a world where we simply move from a set of legacy applications to a set of legacy processes and swap a set of functional silos for a set of process silos." In that respect this book is a must read for Process Professionals and Systems Analysts alike.

Processes need an architecture and conceptual framework of their own, not a data-oriented information systems paradigm. While new "service-oriented" architectures and techniques for software development offer flexible, loosely-coupled approaches to computing, these advances, though good, are aimed at technical people who build and manage information systems, e.g., programmers, not business analysts who want to build and manage business processes. To this end, a modeling framework based on techniques compatible with process-oriented architecture is needed to supersede information-oriented approaches to process modeling and analysis. This shift from the Information Age to the Process Age in terms of architecture and methods will serve as the cornerstone of BPM, now that the tinkering, tactical deployment phase is moving on to strategic enterprise BPM.

In effect, BPM assimilation in the enterprise has reached a watershed:

"It's almost universally agreed that the BPM market opportunity is very high, that its compound annual growth rate (unrestrained by a bad economy) is among the highest for any software category, and that the potential ROI and rate of return has few peers. In 2000, most estimates of the BPM market were in the tens or perhaps low hundreds of millions in U.S. dollars. By some analyst forecasts, the BPM market will be between $4 and $6 billion U.S. dollars in 2005."
"Taking The Pulse of BPM," March 22, 2005, David McGoveran takes the pulse of the current BPM market by talking to five key industry analysts. http://www.bpm.com/FeaturePrint.asp?FeatureId=155

Yet despite the best efforts of standards bodies, IT vendors are responding with a myriad of diverse offerings-typically either enhancements of legacy workflow/EAI software or concoctions based on an assortment of acquisitions. And these products, with their associated proprietary development methods, do not conform to any generally accepted set of principles for the construction of process-based systems:

"The realization of those sketchy flowcharts drawn by business analysts on whiteboards requires an architecture built on the best of BPM's many standards: BPEL, BPMN, and WS-CDL. Alas, no actual vendor implementation of this architecture exists today."
“What Is Business Process Modeling,”, July 20, 2005, Mike Havey (author of “Essential Business Process Modeling”, 2005, O’Reilly), http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/07/20/businessprocessmodeling.html  

The market is awash with complexity, and may well be heading for meltdown, as the maintenance costs of unstructured, proprietary process systems start to outweigh their benefits. And while vendors and consultants are quite as aware of this state of affairs as analysts and users, so far they have been helpless to improve the situation. We have any number of process languages and standards bodies. But we do not have a universal set of principles on which all process systems can be based-a complete, consistent, and fully business-oriented methodology for the conceptualization and construction of process-based systems, fulfilling the vision of BPM's pioneers that a business process should directly implement:

"the complete and dynamically coordinated set of collaborative and transactional activities that deliver value to customers."
Smith, H., Fingar, P., 2003, “Business Process Management: The Third Wave,” Meghan-Kiffer Press

...

[Human Interaction Management aka HIM] is a method rather than a notational technique, programming language, or software protocol. HIM unifies various existing disciplines (Role Activity Theory, Cognitive Theory, Social Systems Theory, Learning Theory, multiple process-based Computer Science disciplines, and more) into a complete theory of human, collaborative work-and shows how this theory can be used not only to model, but also to manage, any human-driven business processes. HIM also offers a new approach to quality, showing how metrics based on human resource utilization (rather than traditional manufacturing metrics such as cost and cycle time) can be used to achieve new levels of operational efficiency and effectiveness. This approach doesn't negate traditional measures such as ROI, profit growth, profit per employee, and revenue and revenue growth. Rather, smart executives see these measures more as symptoms, not as causes. Just as 'time' (cycle time, response time, inventory turn time, and so on) can me managed as a business variable in addition to traditional systematic measures such as cost, human utilization metrics can be measured, not as symptoms, but as causes of productivity and performance. You cannot manage symptoms; but you can manage causes of those symptoms.
The claim of HIM is that human-driven processes are generally the part of the process "iceberg" that is hidden under the water-the almost invisible work that nevertheless underpins any organization:

"Current approaches to analysis of business processes deal very well with the part above the water, and hardly at all with the part below. Human activity, where it is covered at all, is treated as if it was mechanistic-which is probably worse than leaving it alone. Hence, businesses are competing on only a small part of the activity they carry out: the routinized, regulated, mechanistic part. How much advantage could be gained by competing on the human activity as well?"

Harrison-Broninski identifies five main features of human working activity, and explains not only how they can be modeled, but also how they can be managed:

1. Connection visibility. In automated processes, the ultimate aim is to rationalize the distribution of data, logic and control, regardless of "who and what" these resources are, or what they represent, or with what they naturally interact. In human collaborative situations, by contrast, quite the opposite is true. A human process creates meaningful connections between participants whose skills, responsibilities, authorities and resources are quite distinct, and probably very different. To work with people, you need to know who they are and what they can do. Therefore, collaborative technology must provide a strong representation of process participants, the roles they play and the private information resources that belong to each of them. HIM does this using Role Activity Diagrams (RADs)-a simple graphical approach to depicting processes that anyone can understand in moments with no need for training.

2. Structured messaging. Messaging is an enabling force for human-computer interaction, yet typically results in efficiency losses as well as gains. For example, the volume of email received by organizational workers is an increasing problem-sorting it by relevance and priority alone can consume much of a working day. If we are to manage our interactions with others better, they must be structured for us, under process control. For Harrison-Broninski, Role Activity Diagrams are again a way forward, because they allow us to show not only the communications between process participants, but also to impose structure on them-by showing their intention, describing the content of the message, and showing the interaction in a process context so that its dependencies and impacts can be understood.

3. Support for mental work. A large part of what humans do has little concrete output-at least, not the kind of concrete output that is easily measured by existing management techniques or computer systems. Yet the time and mental effort invested in researching, comparing, considering, deciding, and generally responding to information-turning it into knowledge and ideas-is a critical part of the job of an interaction worker. Mental effort along with all other human activity is described in HIM via a simple and generic pattern Research Evaluate Analyze Constrain Task, or REACT (where Research has a sub-pattern Access, Identify, Memorize, or AIM). REACT and AIM repeated, interleaved, nested, and split across process participants can be used to create process descriptions that reflect the reality of human activity. Harrison-Broninski also identifies a pattern for collaborative transactions that allows a complex problem to be managed as a group of simpler ones, with the necessary dependencies automatically catered for. All of these patterns are depicted via Role Activity Diagrams. More importantly, they can be modified "on the fly" in response to changing dynamics of the business.

4. Supportive rather than prescriptive activity management. Humans do not sequence their activities in the manner of a procedural computer program-"after doing x, I either do y or z, only depending on the outcome of x." A person that worked like this would be a machine. On the contrary, people take action in different ways on different days, in response to their dealings with others, to changes in the state of resources to which they have access, and-if we're realistic-to their mood at the time. HIM supports this in a simple way by changing the way we read a classical Role Activity Diagram. A particular activity or interaction has a precondition (a state of affairs in which it becomes available) and a postcondition (a state of affairs that is guaranteed to be the case on completion). HIM allows people to carry out any activity for which the precondition is true, at any time-no matter what activities they just did previously-and insists that any activity whose results violate the postcondition must be completely undone, in accordance with the business rules set by business managers, so as to prevent it derailing the process.

5. Processes change processes. Human activities are concerned often with solving problems, or making something happen. Such activities routinely start in the same fashion-by establishing a way of proceeding. Before you can design your new widget, or develop your marketing plan, you need to work out how you are going to do so-which methodology to use, which tools are required, which people should be consulted, and so on. In other words, process definition is an intrinsic part of the process itself. Further, this is not a one-time thing-it happens continually throughout the life of the process. Hence actions and interactions in human-driven processes cause continual change to the process itself. Harrison-Broninski deals with this by developing a new approach to process management. The principle of separation of control allows him to distinguish management control (day-to-day facilitation of human activity, carried out as part of the process itself-ongoing resourcing, monitoring and process re-design) from executive control (exercise of authority over the process, via determination of its primary Roles, interactions and deliverables). Process evolution can then be implemented under management control via the establishment of consensus among certain participants, based on how they would proceed from now on-Harrison-Broninski terms such a consensus an agreement. Each successive agreement can be documented and shared via an updated Role Activity Diagram.

With this last aspect of HIM, the principle of "separation of control," Harrison-Broninski breaks striking new ground for modeling the management of human-driven processes. In general, though, HIM offers a variety of important new approaches.

...

For BPM to mature and become a stable business practice, its technologies must be applied using a complete and consistent process-based method. Taken together, Riva (for process architecture and process modeling) and Human Interaction Management (for human-driven process modeling and management) provide the overarching framework for 21st century business technology.

Despite the past fifty years’ advances in business automation, the heart and soul of every organization is still its people without whom the organization will stop dead in its tracks. While system-to-system interactions are the focal point of many BPM tools, the critical human-to-human interactions, the human-driven work processes, require special attention, for it’s people that get work done. Understanding the pivotal role of human-driven processes and how work is accomplished is the key to understanding the dynamics of real-world business processes, as you can learn from the landmark book "Human Interactions: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management".

We have machines for doing machine-like work these days; machines can assemble TVs and cars, machines can manipulate huge quantities of information, machines can deliver precisely defined messages in microseconds, and so on. The work that is left for human beings to do is very different in character. After all, somebody has to design the new car and the new production line. Somebody has to evaluate the results of calculations and spot new trends. Somebody has to listen to messages and respond with understanding and insight. So we get human beings to check things, evaluate things, decide things, correct things, solve things, create things. Many of them spend their time thinking, understanding, persuading, communicating and, crucially, discussing and collaborating with other human beings. Much of this activity has very little tangible output and yet we dedicate our brightest and highest paid people to it. It is some of the most valuable work that our businesses do.

But the enthusiasts continue to talk as if businesses and the business processes that constitute them were purely mechanistic ...

The world has a plentiful supply of books for managers in search of a trendy new acronym but what distinguishes this book from the run-of-the-mill guru manifesto is that Harrison-Broninski develops these apparently simple themes into a practical and rigorous management approach, assembling ideas and research from an impressively wide range of technical, sociological and psychological sources. In fact, he goes as deep as anyone could reasonably want to go. Having made a very persuasive case to business managers, he goes on to explain the implications for process specialists in much more technical language and in the later chapters he even explains how software specialists might go about building a HIM System. (In my view this demonstrates a considerable degree of intellectual generosity given that he has already built one of his own!)

But as he says, this is not a book about systems; it is a book about the nature of work itself and, whether he is right or wrong, he deserves credit for pointing out that there is an elephant in the room. We have business process tools that cannot describe how business processes really work, we have workflow systems that ignore the real nature of work and we manage human beings with systems built on the mathematics of automata.

Now we have an alternative. In the notion of Human Interaction Management Keith Harrison-Broninski presents us with a way of describing, managing and increasing the value of human beings.

As HR professionals, especially HRIS professionals, who have long studied the process of work and how the application of technology could improve that process, you'll find this book quite interesting. The author reminds us that managing and controlling processes is what we are ultimately trying to achieve. He explains that whatever people may say or think, the fact is that most work processes (and the hardest ones to control) occur between people (rather than between computer systems). The book puts forward some very powerful ideas to support new ways of thinking about processes and the systems that support them. ...

As with most successful books, the author goes outside the obvious resources and combines insights drawn from other fields of study - namely biology, psychology, social systems theory and learning theory, with a deep understanding of business process analysis to form a complete theory of human work ...

This is a book that you will find helpful in your career as you continue to utilize technology towards the goal of improved employee performance and customer service.

Taking steps to optimize business processes and integrate them more effectively with other processes across the company is a popular pursuit for many organizations in search of efficiency gains. But all too often, project teams that are involved in business process management (BPM) efforts tend to focus too much on how systems interact with one another. They fail to adequately address the most important aspect of business processes: the people who are doing the actual work. As author Peter Fingar has said, "Processes don't work; people do."

This book can be looked upon as a template for how to work on BPM projects from a people perspective. Harrison-Broninski, chief technology officer at Role Modelers Ltd. in the U.K., does a nice job of describing how people approach their work. He also offers steps that BPM project teams can take to coordinate the three legs that support the BPM stool: people, processes and technology. There are sections devoted to simple but critical topics such as how people communicate and how people work things out.

Although the book feels a bit too scientific at times, the underlying approach provides readers and practitioners with a well-constructed methodology for managing the human elements of BPM.

With the current business climate asking if IT really matters anymore (as a differentiator) and reduced spending on new systems while trying to get the most from existing ones, Harrison-Broninski steps into the breech with some truly original analysis. His book essentially forces us to consider the question: "What should we change if people really are the most valuable asset in business?"

The author's answer is both profound and feasible. While he does not discard the current generation of workflow and BPM systems, he finds their value only in a limited range of processes that can be described mechanistically. Today's systems force workers to be in lockstep with machines and the timing those machines (software) assume. As an alternative, Harrison-Broninski offers us an in depth look at how people actually work (based upon over a decade of his research and that of other experts) and proposes a new type of BPM solution he calls a Human Interaction Management System (HIMS). ...

... I love this book. It has caused me to think and learn about processes in a healthy way. The author is a hard-working genius and I truly hope his ideas see the fruition they deserve. It seems inevitable to me, just a question of time. Buy this brilliant book if you are deeply interested in the interaction of people and computers, especially in the not too distant future.

Business adviser/jazz musician/former software designer/really deep thinker Harrison-Broninski is interested in improving and managing work processes.  Offering the central message that it is people, not processes, who actually perform the work, he proposes ways of "amplifying" work by providing computer support for human-driven processes ... Harrison-Broninski promises the patient reader new insights into improving work and work life, and new ideas for "bending computers to the work of humans, rather than the other way around."

Human Interactions: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management (Harrison-Broninski, Meghan-Kiffer Press, 2005)
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