Google Wave beta, the BITA view
I would like to welcome everyone back and hope your holidays were great. Consider this one those early January real world wake up calls reminding you that the holidays are over and it’s time to hit it again. It’s OK to have a heavy sigh of resignation now; I’ll wait until you’re finished… OK, now that you’re fully reengaged, I’ll move on.
A few weeks ago I became part of the Google Wave beta program. For those of you that don’t know what Google Wave is, I’ll summarize. It’s Google’s spin on what real-time threaded message collaboration should look like. For those of you who want a more robust description, I’ll provide a link here. For those of you who are more visual there is a YouTube video below.
I believe that Google sees it as the next generation of email. I think that is naïve at best. The current version of Wave tries to be all things to all people and is just too much for most people outside of a dedicated team collaboration scenario. For example, writing notes on paper preceded email by millennia. Yet it persists both in the form of paper notes as well as electronic text messages. I do think that Wave will offer some great opportunities for those of us in the business-IT alignment, or BITA, space. One of the core requirements for IT doing a better job of supporting their company’s core business processes is improved communication between IT and their customers. Any tool that makes that communication more effective is a good thing.
The best way to explain my point is through a simple example. An example wave is shown below. Since I am the only member of this hypothetical team I must ask for your understanding by imagining a larger group.
What you see is a threaded discussion much like you would see in Lotus Notes, Microsoft Groove or any one of several other discussion board tools. In this case, the wave is a new manufacturing requirement proposal document that IT needs to prepare. The initial entry for this thread is the general statement of what needs to be done. Subsequent statements hold the initial text for each of the three sections. The collaborators for each section can then begin to edit that text with supporting discussions as to why they made their changes to it.
The strength of Wave is the ability to see modifications as they are made and to engage in an instant messaging discussion as the process takes place (phone calls can work too but that isn’t very Web 2.0). You could be seeing text and discussions appearing in all three groups simultaneously in real-time by different people. It would be a little like having a real-time control room where you are watching a manufacturing activity taking place before your eyes. Such activity can become unmanageable very quickly without some ground rules, especially if the manufacturing group is included as collaborators. This doesn’t consider that the whole Wave platform is open source and can be extended to include all kinds of cloud-based tools.
To me it’s clear that for work of any complexity it makes sense to embed Wave into another application which will manage the workflow and constrain the flexibility of the Wave tool to something that is manageable for real world use. The good news is that such applications can be built fairly quickly or adapted from other existing applications.
I’m sure that Wave will evolve fairly quickly into something very useful for real business use. Then it just becomes a question of a company’s comfort level with using cloud-based tools for sensitive work. I hope you found this post useful. I can now say that I’m fully reengaged after my holidays. My heavy sigh follows…
