Three years ago in their book The Third Wave, Peter Fingar and Howard Smith, wrote what has since come to be regarded as a manifesto for radical business change based on business process management (BPM) technology. Now though, says Fingar, the time is already right to prepare for a new, and potentially even more radical, fourth wave of business automation – human interaction management systems (HIMS).

According to Fingar, even though much of what he and Smith described in The Third Wave has still to be realised, among its most sophisticated early adopters, BPM has already eliminated most of the back-end system bottlenecks that have traditionally impeded business development.

For these organisations, it is time to move on: “The real future, if you look at business process management – the key part of it that has not been fully addressed – is human to human interaction,” he says.

To some extent, this assertion is already recognised in the current industry vogue for collaborative, Internet-based personal productivity tools such as Google’s Writely word processor and spreadsheet products. Unlike first generation Microsoft Office-like applications, such so-called Office 2.0 products are designed from the ground up to distribute and share documents. However, HIMS proponents believe that these advances do not really solve human interactivity problems, and may actually be making them far worse.

The drawback of most Office 2.0 products, says the founder and chief technology officer of HIMS pioneer, Role Modellers Ltd, Keith Harrison-Broninski, is that they persist in applying a task or document oriented approach to work, when what is really required is context, or process-based view.

Typical of this problem, says Broninski, is the daily battle that many office workers face to simply deal with all the email in the inbox. This avalanche of correspondence typically arrives in an unwieldy mass that, if it is differentiated at all, is done so according to rudimentary filter parameters such as ’sender’, ’title’ or ’date’.

“In no way does this help people collaborate better. If anything, it totally removes any kind of context from the communications that you’re having with other people. It forces you to spend more time filtering work, and less time actually doing it,” says Broninski.

HIMS will overcome this problem by providing the means for people to set up processes, rather than document or task-based ways of working. At Role Modellers, for instance, Broninski is working on Humanedj, a collaborative tool that works more like a project management suite than a traditional office application.

However, Broninski’s is far from being the only company pursuing what analysts such as Gartner’s Janelle Hill believe is a lucrative market for HIMS and other “high-performance office systems”. But, she adds, “that market is at least another five years away.”