Keith: Thank you Liz - it's a pleasure.

Liz: Today we're going to talk about the HumanEdj software recently released by Keith's company Role Modellers. This is a "new breed of human productivity software", based on the principles of Human Interaction Management. Keith, some people listening to this will be familiar with Human Interaction Management, but for those that aren't, perhaps you could start by giving us an overview of what it's all about?

Keith: Yes, that's a good idea, Liz. Human Interaction Management, usually abbreviated to HIM, is a new way of looking at work, a way that deals properly with creativity and collaboration in the workplace. The basic idea is to do for knowledge work in the 21st century what Scientific Management did for industrial production in the 20th century. Many people know how the work of early 20th century Scientific Management theorists such as Taylor and Galbraith gradually evolved into a number of standard practices. These standard practices include methodologies such as Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing, and these days are usually put under the umbrella of Total Quality Management, or TQM. Now TQM techniques are widely applied by organizations of all kinds. However, on their own they only get you so far - there is a huge body of work carried out by any organization that such techniques leave completely untouched.

Liz: I assume you're talking about human work?

Keith: Yes, a certain kind of human work, anyway. All the standard TQM methodologies trace their roots back to assembly line manufacturing. What they deal properly with is business processes that are routinized: work which consists of doing the same thing over and over again, in almost exactly the same way each time. HIM calls this type of business process mechanistic. It explains how there is another type of business process altogether, which it calls human-driven. Human-driven work is innovative and adaptive; it's about gathering, using and sharing information in order to solve business problems. Many people, when they start to think about work in this light, say that the most important work done in their organization is actually human-driven rather than mechanistic.

Liz: Could you give some examples of the 2 types of business process?

Keith: Mechanistic processes cover things like manufacturing, certain kinds of testing, logistics, order processing, invoicing, settlement, payroll and so on. Human-driven processes cover things like research, design, marketing, sales, customer support, team leadership, managing organizational change, software development, and so on - any work in which humans interact to create and innovate solutions.

Liz: Is what HIM calls "human-driven" work the same as what most people call "knowledge work" or "information work"?

Keith: It's related. HIM covers many types of knowledge work, as well as some work that people might not describe as knowledge work, but that is actually quite creative and mentally demanding, like fault resolution in a telecommunications provider. What HIM is really about, is work in which people collaborate to come up with a solution. In such situations, part of the ongoing collaboration is about deciding how you will do the work - in other words, you redefine the business process for the work as you go along. HIM calls this "interaction work", as opposed to "independent work". HIM provides a whole host of useful principles, patterns and techniques for doing interaction work better - and equally important, for managing it better.

Liz: You mentioned business processes. Can you use workflow or BPM tools to help with interaction work?

Keith: No. There are lots of reasons why. For a start, it would be almost impossible to use mainstream workflow and BPM tools to redefine the process as you go along - not only are they too technical for ordinary business people, but they just don't give you the means to evolve the process from within. Also, mainstream workflow and BPM tools don't provide much collaboration functionality - certainly nothing like the features people need in order to share messages, documents and data in a structured way. More fundamentally, there is a basic problem with the principle on which mainstream workflow and BPM tools are all based - they assume that work "flows" from step to step, which is not how humans do interaction work.

Liz: What do you mean?

Keith: Well, all workflow and BPM tools assume that a business process is what computer scientists call an automaton - a software program, if you like, that does one thing and then another in sequence (occasionally with more than one sequence carrying on at a time). Effectively, such tools treat all business processes as flowcharts. But human-driven processes are nothing at all like flowcharts! People create private information spaces, they share information at different times with different people, they have ongoing activities, they make decisions and choose activities in very flexible ways, new players may be introduced at any time, old players may leave, … there are all sorts of things involved in interaction work that simply don't fit the flowchart model. To support human-driven work, you need a different approach entirely.

Liz: So what have people been doing about human-driven business processes until now?

Keith: From what our customers tell us, tearing their hair out! Most organizations don't know what to do. Some have tried workflow or BPM and ended up with expensive failures. Some have tried using "groupware" tools - messaging, document sharing, content management, and so on - but found that these solutions don't scale. They seem to work OK when the interaction work is limited to a few people, but once you roll groupware tools out across an organization, they actually cause more problems than they solve. People end up spending a lot of time writing messages to lists, circulating documents, updating shared documents, etc without there being any way to control what is going on. Or even to know what is going on. This means you can't measure the effectiveness of such activity, or work out how to do it better.

Liz: What about Web 2.0? Doesn't that help?

Keith: In the end, Web 2.0 is just another set of groupware tools. The same problems apply to editing wiki pages as to updating documents in a content management system. I think a lot of people are becoming very unproductive as a direct result of groupware tools, including Web 2.0. Especially Web 2.0, which is now consuming more and more of people's time in the workplace! I hear a lot of organizations saying that their main costs are in human-driven business processes, but that they don't know how to become more efficient. And it's a real problem, since in a world where all routine work is being automated and outsourced, human work is the main competitive differentiator left. It is how organizations are judged, both by their market and by their stakeholders.

Liz: So how does Human Interaction Management help?

Keith: In 2 ways. First, it provides a simple, general way to structure human-driven business processes. HIM includes patterns and techniques both for doing human-driven work and for managing human-driven work. Simply applying this methodology will result in an immediate performance improvement. Second, HIM defines the new kind of software that is required to support human-driven work - software that genuinely understands what the businessperson needs in order to be productive.

Liz: What is this kind of software called?

Keith: A Human Interaction Management System, or HIMS. You can think of a HIMS as a new kind of desktop, in a way. A HIMS changes what you do when you sit down at your computer in the morning. At the moment, most people first spend several hours wading through emails from everyone under the sun - the BBC say the average is 2 hours just to read your email, not even including the time required to respond! Then most people embark on a series of tasks without having any way of knowing which tasks deliver the most business advantage to their organization, and hence which ones they should focus on. Peter Drucker explained back in the 1960s that effectiveness was about managing your time. Well, at the moment people don't have the tools to do it with.

Liz: So a HIMS lets you manage your time better?

Keith: Yes. If you are using a HIMS, you open it first thing in the morning, and see all the human-driven work processes you are engaged in. But it's not like workflow, where you get a list of "Notifications" or "Tasks" to work through one by one, like a robot. Instead, you see a complete context for each process. You can see information and messages, old and new. You can choose the Tasks you want to carry out. You have the option to join or leave processes in a controlled way. And everything you do is managed by the system, in the background.

Liz: What do you mean, "managed by the system"?

Keith: Well, for a start, a HIMS remembers everything you do, which is fantastically important if you need to demonstrate compliance with regulations, strategy or policy. This alone is a time-saver, and when it comes to things like SOX, can even be a business-saver! A HIMS also lets you manage your work. On a personal level, you can undo any actions you take, including changes you make to documents, and this is also recorded for audit purposes. On an organizational level, a HIMS lets a manager see what their staff are actually doing during the day, so they can help support their staff and make them more efficient.

Liz: Isn't this a bit like Big Brother?

Keith: No, since you are not obliged to use the HIMS if you don't want to. For instance, you can send emails or write documents outside the HIMS if you like. But for most people, the HIMS is like having a personal assistant that they can rely on completely. The HIMS saves them all the bother of writing and filing status reports, typing up data in a CRM system, filling in SOX-compliance forms, and so on. As much as anything else, the HIMS is the individual's way of demonstrating what they are doing for the organization - with zero effort required to do so. A HIMS allows you to communicate with your management when you need to. And cover your back when you need to!

Liz: What is the state of the HIMS market at the moment?

Keith: I've been working in this field since 1987, and some of the ideas go back before that. But it's still early days for the HIMS software marketplace, since some key technologies needed to make a viable HIMS only emerged in the last few years.

Liz: Are any other software vendors now thinking of producing their own HIMS?

Keith: There are several companies who have jumped on the HIM bandwagon and declared their current software to be a HIMS. But these products are just legacy technology under a new name - it's generally workflow, portals or content management. The only true HIMS available at this time is HumanEdj, from Role Modellers. However, several large software vendors have been involved in the pre-release testing of HumanEdj, and some have said they would like to incorporate such features into their own products. So they may build their own genuine HIMS products, or OEM HumanEdj, or do a bit of both.

Liz: You mentioned the pre-release testing. Is HumanEdj available now on general release?

Keith: You can download it now. However, the release announcement will not be made until mid to late February, by which time there will be more audio-visual materials available to help people get going - case studies, in particular.

Liz: What sort of case studies?

Keith: The pre-release testing involved over 100 companies, from many different sectors: telecommunications, engineering, IT, recruitment, marketing, education, the military and more. We were overwhelmed by the number of companies who wrote to us asking to join the testing! This is great, of course, since it shows the level of need for HIMS software. However, it does mean that the market is a very broad church, and we need to show a lot of very different people how to use HumanEdj for their own purposes. So to answer your question, we are preparing all sorts of case studies!

Liz: Assuming that I wanted to get started with HumanEdj, what would I do?

Keith: It's desktop software, with no server-side components at all. So you can download it and install it on Windows with a few clicks. Then you should watch the screencasts at humanedj.com - there is a 15-minute screencast that explains HIM, and a 30-minute screencast that explains HumanEdj. You might also like to read the first few pages of the User Guide and glance through the online Frequently Asked Questions. Then you can get going. HumanEdj itself does everything it can to help you get started. In most cases it configures your workspace automatically, for example.

Liz: Is training available?

Keith: Yes. Role Modellers offers everything from short fixed-price training packages to setup of corporate adoption programmes. There are full details on rolemodellers.com.

Liz: Finally, how is HumanEdj licensed?

Keith: The standard edition is free, and does everything you need to support human-driven processes. If you intend to roll HumanEdj out across an entire organization, you can consider paying to license it, in which case you get guaranteed support from Role Modellers, and also some additional features that support enterprise use are unlocked.

Liz: Keith, thanks very much for your time today. I'm sure that many ebizQ readers will be interested to find out more about HIM and HumanEdj.

Keith: Thank you, Liz. I hope that some listeners to this podcast find HIM and HumanEdj useful in their work.