Despite advances in business automation in recent years, the heart and soul of every organization is still its people, without whom the organization would stop dead in its tracks. The author shows how far we are from having a complete way to manage the complex, continually changing work processes carried out by humans, and how important it is to do better on this matter.

The book combines relevant concepts from biology, psychology, social systems theory, and learning theory with a deep understanding of business process analysis to form a complete theory of human work.

The key idea is to promote the human workers involved in sectors where their activity is highly conditioned by other humans and where it exists to a significant degree of autonomy. In these sectors, as the author shows, a keystone for business automation is to involve human interactions in the process concept, making it possible to consider them but providing enough flexibility for human activities inside the process.

In essence, the book focuses on four points:

• that human interactions form the basis of most of the work in an organization;
• an explanation of the science and psychology behind how such interactions take place;
• the argument that current approaches to capturing and modeling these interactions are unsuitable; and
• that there are lessons to be gained from role activity theory.

The first two points above are very well managed in the book, with a lot of references and space devoted to them. With regard to the third point, a great deal of effort is invested in showing that there is a basic problem with classic notation for modeling the REACT pattern in an effective way.

The author proposes using an improved version of the role activity diagram (RAD) to explain why a technique arising early in the 1980s has not had the impact that could have been expected. The author suggests some improvements allowing it to be included as a tool inside computer-supported processes.

One fresh approach presented in the book is to remove the notion of offering a new remedy that overrules all previous approaches. Instead of this, the author tries to borrow and build from what has gone before. This is expected to help readers in two ways: first, they were engaged with the ideas and theories presented, and, second, all relevant concepts are carefully referenced at the end of each chapter.

The book provides some interesting discussion on the theory of how people work together. The author could have enhanced the content with the inclusion of case studies showing how these theories can help during day-to-day activities at real companies.

In summary, this is an excellent work for business analysts and managers, as they will gain from the diagnoses provided in the initial chapters. Process designers will also find the book very interesting, since it explains why in many cases the current technological approaches fail to arouse the interest of business people.