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This morning a colleague pointed me to a blog post by Dion Hinchcliffe, Leveraging Web 2.0 for business growth. Hinchcliffe, like many other pundits at the moment, paints a rosy picture of the new world of work that will be enabled by Web 2.0 technologies. The trouble is, this new world will only be rosy for a very few people indeed.

Hinchcliffe has picked up on the analyst firm McKinsey's term "tacit interactions". This term was described at length in their article "The next revolution in interactions", published in the McKinsey Quarterly, Q4 2005. The authors use the term to describe a particular form of collaborative knowledge work:

the searching, monitoring, and coordinating required to manage the exchange of goods and services

They go on to write:

Currently, jobs that involve participating in interactions rather than extracting raw materials or making finished goods account for more than 80% 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 authors conclude:

The shift from transactional to tacit interactions requires companies to think differently about how to improve performance - and about their technology investments. Companies can again create capabilities and advantages that rivals can't easily duplicate.

I agree whole heartedly with all this, and often quote the above words in support of my own work on Human Interaction Management (HIM). So it is good to see other writers quoting it too! However, when it comes to implementing the "shift from transactional to tacit interactions", Hinchcliffe (along with many other writers in love with all things 2.0) is looking in the wrong place.

Hinchcliffe, for example, describes the new wave of BPM tools as a means for people to implement their own lightweight process support for tacit interactions. However, consider this quote, taken from the article defining "BPM 2.0" to which he himself links:

BPM 2.0 is not for non-technical business analysts. Never should have been, never will, and nobody should care.

Indeed. BPM is for technicians, and this applies whether you are talking about version 1.0, version 2.0 or version 99.0. And it's not me saying this, but the software vendor (Intalio) who defined the term "BPM 2.0"!

So what about all the business people whose work is all about tacit interactions, but who could not reasonably describe themselves as "technical business analysts"? If we take Hinchcliffe at his word, this community is excluded by definition from the new and exciting Web 2.0 world. And I should think that this community includes about 99% of knowledge workers.

TAKE AWAY

The new world of work is exciting. Too exciting to leave it all to the techies! Web 2.0 tools are powerful levers for business growth, but efficient and effective use of them requires support for "tacit interactions" - i.e., a new form of business process.

I call this new form of business process "human-driven" - a term that should not be confused with the "human-centric" processes that are often discussed by analysts such as Forrester and are now supported by various BPM tools. Human-centric processes allow humans to interact with machines, typically to enter data or make low-level decisions, and have become mainstream. Human-driven processes are another thing entirely - they are a higher-level type of beast, and support for them is still emerging.

In particular, human-driven processes include interactions between humans and other humans, which requires new ideas and new tools. If you want to be part of the new world of work, BPM will not help you (whatever the version) - what you need is HIM.

Posted by keithhb in Business Process Management |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us