Will Google Wave have an impact on Human-Centric BPM?

Absolutely!

Wave has the potential to completely redefine the use of workflow technology, in much the same way as portals impacted application UI's. Integration between workflow engines (or robots) and Wave would enable rich interaction options only achievable today with massive integration of disparate technology platforms.

Think about the MSFT offerings...BizTalk, Inform, Sharepoint, Exchange...all needed just to start to come close to the functionality of Wave + Workflow.

And even then, only for internal enterprise applications - what about workflows that execute across multiple organizations / servers? We can't even imagine how limited we would be with email that only worked on one server, without the ability to transfer mail across servers. Soon...with Wave, we will be able to interpretively execute workflows across distributed wave servers.

So why did you limit your question to Human Centric workflows? That is a very limiting, and totally artificial, distinction. There is no reason why Wave can't also enable an integration of structured and unstructured data, and support Integration Centric capabilities as well.

- CDB

Yes, but it will be driven by the users. Management tends to look for metrics. Users just want to get the job done. As google wave becomes available you will see all kinds of "waves" started to automate processes where users won't want to wait for management/IT to automate. A few of the more proactive IT groups will embrace and support this, but I'm not sure it can be stopped. I predict google wave will shake things up big time over the next few years as we continue to see the power shift from central IT to the users who want things quickly and cheaply. Should be very interesting. Mix this in with stuff like Microsofts "Natal" technology and you'll see some really creative stuff.

Yes, but not nearly as big of an effect as it will have on CMS, DMS, and Enterprise Collaboration software and software vendors. We all know that email is broken and has been for years. CMS, DMS, and Enterprise Collaboration (more so than Workflow) have many aspects that have become popular because of the failure of email. If Wave "fixes" email by bringing to it the best of messaging (instant, corporate, file transfer, etc), then Wave will make a big impact. I do believe that Wave will quickly relegate to the history books the very clunky "outlook components" that so many vendors seem compelled to create to interface with their software.

Wave has the potential for a big impact on BPM (or any collaborative technology). See our BP3 blog (www.bp-3.com/blogs/2009/09/gravity-google-wave-and-sap/) on the subject.

It offers compelling features, but keeping in mind that if it follows the trend of previous Google offerings, it will require gmail or google-hosted email accounts - which will be a hindrance to large corporations adopting Wave (which is one of the ironic aspects of SAP promoting the Gravity demo). The barriers, as I see them:
1. security concerns, w.r.t. sharing process definition and execution information via Google Wave (outside the firewall, server side storage).
2. requirements on users to adopt Google/Gmail identities to interact with the Wave
3. overlap with existing functionality in existing toolsets
4. management insecurity about the new technology (lack of top-down control).

It wouldn't surprise me to see someone come up with a more enterprise-friendly Wave... Or maybe Google will do that itself this time.

I think the uptake will be stronger for definition collaboration than for process-execution. But clearly it could help a lot with informal processes that fall outside the scope of BPM tools at the moment.

I agree with Brian Reale – there will be some impact on workflow but likely more impact on collaboration tools.

Human-Centric BPM goes way beyond simple collaboration around a document or meeting or an idea – we are not going to see a pharmaceutical firm use Google Wave to manage their clinical trials or a bank switching off of human centric BPM to Wave for new customer sign up. BPM is more than work flow – it is automated, complex business logic being used to optimize knowledge workers' activities. This requires tracking service level agreements, escalations, and applying automation.

There is collaboration and even some ad-hocness to many BPM processes but in our experience customers are not deploying BPM simply to promote collaboration but to solve really complex but often highly structured business processes.

So is Google Wave cool and exciting? Yes. Will it have a huge impact on how organizations solve complex the human-centric process problems? No, it will not.

Google Wave is going to be big, but its impact on BPM is primarily going to be to “ad hoc� business processes. When processes include parts where the user can decide to get help from people of their choosing, then that part of the process will be ad hoc, since the precise steps and order of the collaboration is not predefined. This is where Google Wave’s comingling of email, IM and collaborative document editing will have the largest impact.

However, when the user thinks of the task as “done� and doesn’t know what will happen next, by whom, or even whether the next step will be automated or manual – in that case the BPM is in control of the flow of the process and Google Wave will not have much of an effect on the way that it is done.

I agree with Brian Reale that the Wave will have bigger impact in CMS and DMS and other areas where collaboration and communication form the pivot.

The impact of Wave on BPM will of course be limited to the extent to which collaborative(etc) aspects can be leveraged.

Having said that, the features of BPM products today have been inspired and supported by possibilities 'limited by the limitations' of technology we have had access to.
I think since Wave, and other Social Media tools open up a whole range of new possibilities, the impact - at least in the case of BPM - may actually happen in more than one level -

Level 1 i think will see BPM products leveraging Wave capability (as add-ins)in their immediate future releases and

Level 2 will see perhaps the more significant impact - that of how the overall design and components in the product architecture can be re-oriented to leverage a whole set of new tech possibilities that Wave, Social Media, Mashups, etc open up for BPM.

As Scott mentions, all this is still speculation as there are many hurdles yet. I strongly suspect Scott's prediction about Google coming out with an enterprise version of Wave may come true as well.

The next couple of weeks will be exciting as the initial reactions should be out after the release of the 'first' Wave.