Can Google Wave become a Disruptive, Good Enough BPMS?

In the interest of asset re-use, here's a link from a post I wrote responding to the excellent blog from ActionBase:

http://www.bp-3.com/blogs/2009/11/google-wave-a-disruptive-bpm-solution/

There's more detail on the blog, but the basic points:
1. Wave's potential strikes me as similar to sharepoint, excel, and notes to capture processes in orgs with no BPM, and for processes that people don't think of processes as of yet.
2. because it is outside the firewall, there are certain orgs that would use sharepoint/excel/notes that will not use Wave in the foreseeable future.
3. it seems like a real threat to handle the informal parts of a process, or unstructured processes, or collaborative processes, but it also seems a long way from handling the structured use cases of BPM.

Mainly, I don't think Google is particularly interested in BPM, and as a result, Wave by itself is unlikely to move in that direction - but tooling on top of it might...

scott

I have to agree with Scott on that one, especially his point that Google is unlikely to be interested in BPM, so the tool will probably morph away from a structured BPM use-case, rather than towards it. The openness of the tool may make for some interesting value-added solutions growing on top of it.

If businesses try and use Wave, in the form that I have seen it so far, they will not get too much benefit over basic email they already rely on. Processes will continue to not be guided based on the rules or experience of the business, and important work will get lost in the free-for-all of other communications.

I am not knocking Wave. It is a beautiful piece of technology, and should become a core strategy for synchronous collaboration around content of any kind, within, or outside of business processes. Although given this industry's inability to grasp how even basic offline collaboration tools can benefit a structured process, its unlikely most vendors will 'get it'.

I've been writing in detail for a long time about how collaboration can fit alongside and inside structured BPM, for example:

http://blog.consected.com/2006/07/collaborating-in-structured-business_23.html

Finally we are starting to see the rise in 'case management' as a term promoted by BPM vendors, so maybe the structured and collaborative components of business processes working together hand in hand will gain greater significance.

Wave is likely to be full of great hype and have a long wait for genuine corporate adoption.

Phil
http://www.consected.com

Yes, Google Wave is more oriented toward unstructured processes, but with a wave template (as the original post suggests) it need not be _entirely_ unstructured. And while I don't think it will ever be mistaken for a BPMS, I do think that Google Wave may be used for applications that might otherwise have been created using a workflow-based approach. In my opinion this is fine. A BPMS provides the greatest value when a significant part of the processing can be automated (possibly including exception and event handling). If you have a process where all of the steps are done by people, then there is a reasonable chance that using a templated Google Wave would be good enough as a way to organize the collaboration.

Wave has potential, thats for sure.

I think the larger canvas that is available to Google will prevent it from limiting its potential by entering the BPMS space - which is what I think prompted Scott to say Google may not be interested in the BPMS space.

Google may be more interested in taking over ECM and DMS areas which cut across larger org priorities beyond just BPM. Just BPM may have potential but better as a subset than core.

From a BPM perspective, as a result, we may see Wave having the potential of influencing automation of document and content centric processes. Of course collaboration and unstructured processes is another area and Phil ties up Scotts thoughts to that aspect as well.

I'd like to refer back to another thread started by ebizQ earlier where we had a similar discussion around wave (click )

Brian Reale too had made references to ECM and DMS on the line of thoughts on that thread.

I'm copying part of my comment from there:

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.

It seems most of us are in agreement on this topic so I'll just add a few strategic points:

1) Wave should/does have most ECM/DMS vendors shaking in their shoes and figuring out ways to innovate in a rather urgent way because Wave is going to hit them first.
2) I love the idea that someone will create a highly disruptive BPM tool built on top of Wave - this will absolutely happen
3) In fact, "BPM on top of Wave" will happen soon (6-10 months) and will involve the unique use of wave templates
4) "BPM on top of Wave" will affect case management before it affects more traditional BPM
5) "BPM on top of Wave" might even involve an XPDL or BPMN 2.0 plugin for Wave to allow it to execute an exportable workflow process file.