The Death of Google Wave is interesting.  We’ve written about Wave before, several times, but in particular when SAP put out its “Gravity” demonstration.

The official Google Blog blames the closure of Wave on a lack of user adoption:

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

So, there’s a bunch of open source code, it looks like, that partners and customers might leverage.  But most of us, I think, would prefer to just use a finished product.  There are many other unofficial takes, here and here are two examples.  I had a few others linked, but no need – you can find such commentary easily!

When Wave was announced last year, I spent some time discussing with others what it meant for BPM.  Some thought it was a game-changer, some thought it was a non-event.  The thing that became clear to me: collaboration tools like this are going to tend toward being free, or extremely inexpensive.

Starting last fall, the discussion in BPM circles had often turned to “ACM” (A variant on Case Management).  Some in BPM circles would call this unstructured process. Some would call it “chaotic” or unpredictable processes/work.  Keith Swenson and colleagues even penned a book about managing such unpredictable work.  Google Wave was, to this crowd, a great example of where “knowledge work” is headed – into collaboration spaces, not into BPM software.  To me, it was just proof that email and lightweight project management tools were not going away.   If Google Wave accomplished anything, it showed:

1. Separating yourself from email divorces you from a knowledge worker’s daily routine (some might say, process).
2. If it isn’t trivial to involve the right people in a collaboration, then users give up
3. Collaboration is going to be free or nearly free.  Even if it has pretty amazing features.
4. It is really hard to do a “big bang launch” successfully.  It makes me even more impressed that Apple seems to pull this off with such regularity.

So what does it mean for BPM?  Not much.  Wave was never really about structured interaction, it was about ad-hoc interaction.  Although ad-hoc interaction is important to a good BPM strategy, no one (maybe except for SAP) was really leveraging Wave for this.  If they were, they can probably leverage the open source bits to get a jump on the development effort.  For the ACM crowd, its both good news and bad news.

First, the good news:

1. A free competitor to your products, supported by a major software company, has gone away.
2. Hm. I think that’s it.

The bad news:

1. If you were counting on convincing users to leave email to use your product for knowledge work, it is time to change gears.
2. If you were expecting that being good and free was good enough… Maybe it isn’t.  Although Wave was panned in the press, it really was pretty good at what it did, though perhaps it tried to do too much.
3. If you were expecting to charge a lot of money for general-purpose collaboration software… I think those days are over.
4. If Wave was your favorite example of how ACM was really relevant to what people are doing… time to find a new example.

Silver lining:

1. Collaboration software for very specific purposes will live on (aka process modeling, or services like tripIt).
2. Some of Wave’s features will likely get absorbed by Gmail.
3. Some of Wave’s features will likely show up in other products.

I think Keith Swenson summed it up best for the ACM folks on Twitter:

“nooooo. It can’t beeeee. :-( RT @jpmorgenthal: Google waves goodbye to Wave: http://bit.ly/bg3ixC”

Well, fans of Wave and its approach were bound to be disappointed.  I saw quite a few more comments on twitter with a more positive spin on Wave being shut down.  Google found Wave squeezed inbetween email and all the other things we do in life.  It apparently couldn’t live on its own.  I’m not sure the future of ACM, per se, is anything different.  Yes, the ACM proponents will have their analogies, and they sound compelling.  And we could even agree that a large percentage of work is not addressed by BPM today, or by, more specifically, structured process.  But what ACM proponents fail to mention is that even less work is currently addressed by purpose-built ACM software.  It *could* be, but isn’t.  It is still likely to be addressed by email, project management tools, telephone, hallway conversation, and more email.

Note, I’m not arguing against ACM as a description of work, I’m just looking at the software market and not seeing it as an independent market, yet.  Willing to be proven wrong.  And I think there are a couple vendors that have the right strategy or tactics, but we’ll see if they can execute.

Working on a longer collaborative post on ACM and the marketplace.  Watch this space.

I was recently struck by the difference between a couple of posts about SAP Gravity and Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation.

In the first, some demonstrations of SAP Gravity with Google Wave are presented. But they seem a bit contrived to me – and moreover Google Wave isn’t realistic for enterprise use yet – which makes SAP’s focus on Wave all the more puzzling (since they usually don’t focus on any technology until its pretty tried and true).  Gravity seems to be long on sizzle and short on substance to me.  But I give SAP props for trying something different to unlock innovation around their huge install base.  And honestly, what they’ve done so far has definite “cool” factor.

But then I saw this post on Windows Workflow Foundation, and I see that it is possible to have been in the BPM space for 10 years and still not get the importance of the business – it is still a programmer’s product, rather than a business-person’s product.  You can sum it all up right here:

“The purpose of WF is not to be a complete workflow solution for Windows. Instead, the goal is to make it easier for software developers to create workflow-based Windows applications.”

Luckily, if you really want to be on a Windows-centric solution, there are BPMS vendors out there that do that…

I’ve previously written about various Google Wave blogs and the SAP Gravity Demo, and continuing on that theme, Jacob Ukelson asks whether Google Wave is good enough to become a disruptive force as a “good-enough” BPMS, on the ActionBase blog.

I think there’s no question that Google’s Wave could serve as a “good enough” BPMS for many collaborative, informal, or as-yet-unstructured processes.  It could also serve as a useful collaboration companion to structured process.  One need look no further than two examples from IT history, which are still with us in many enterprises and in many processes:

• Microsoft Excel
• IBM’s Lotus Notes
• Microsoft Sharepoint

After several years of doing “kill-the-fax” initiatives, businesses turned their attention to these other bastions of bad process – Excel, Notes, and Sharepoint.  We’ve done so many projects to replace Microsoft Excel-based processes and Lotus Notes-based processes that we’ve lost count – and often we’re brought in to save a process that is running on Sharepoint.  I wish we had kept statistics on this as it would make for interesting trending data now that we have a large enough sample size.

Google Wave, if it addresses the various security concerns for storing proprietary information outside the firewall, could very well get adopted for informal processes – especially when the participants and managers of the process have not yet come to think of it as a process.  We could refer to these as emergent processes.  Perhaps the first time you do it, you don’t know if it is a one-off or a process.  After you’ve done it a few times, you have a sense that it is process.  After you’ve done it a few thousand times, you start to wonder how you can do this process more efficiently or less often…

However, Jacob goes further than to suggest that Google Wave would disrupt these more entrenched technologies’ use as a poor man’s BPMS.  He suggests that with a few minor enhancements it could fully replace a “full fledged BPMS”.  I don’t see that happening anytime soon for a few reasons:

1. It isn’t really Google’s intent to build a BPMS.  They don’t think of the problem Wave is solving as a “process”.  As a result, they’re unlikely to take it in that direction.  I don’t think you end up with a good BPMS my accident.
2. The structured parts of process are actually useful for larger organizations that actually have that kind of structure or volume.
3. There is a lot of magic under the hood of a BPMS that wouldn’t be trivial to recreate using Wave.  Not impossible, just not trivial.  More likely is a mash-up approach like the SAP Gravity demonstration.
4. It still sits outside the firewall of the corporation, and for all too many companies, that is still a regulatory problem, not to mention a security problem, for their data.

Having said all of that, Google Wave presents itself as an alternative for collaborating on processes to email, Sharepoint, Excel, and Notes.  I also think the real disruptive threat that Wave poses in the BPM space is to vendors that focus exclusively on the unstructured, user-specified processes – these seem like the lowest hanging fruit to capture in Wave.  On the other hand, I can see Wave being fertile ground for tools that inspect your systems to find out what processes you’ve *actually* been running by inspecting the data, rather than starting with a top-down design.  These tools may have a massive new datasource to mine for their customers, assuming Google makes the data available.

Ok.  Forrester didn’t really say that.  But in Ted Schadler’s article “The State of US Workforce Technology Adoption“, point #4 says practically that:

Gen Y employees are getting squashed at work.These younger workers behave very differently from others outside of work, but they are not so different in how they use technology in their jobs. Sixty percent of these 18- to 29-year-olds use social networking at home, but only 13% use it for work — the same percentage as Gen X employees ages 30 to 43.

I wouldn’t have said squashed.  That’s a characterization based on the assumption that Gen Y uses more technology than Gen X.  But only 13% use these social networking tools at work.  For all the carping I’ve heard about Gen Y using Facebook at work, one our own Gen Y members recently told me he quit using Facebook entirely and doesn’t miss it.  My personal theory:  like everyone else, Gen Y folks value real relationships more than virtual ones and eventually everyone finds a balance.  And at the end of the day, there’s work to get done.

Maybe, someday soon, we can stop this “generational” management stuff and get back to work.  But sure as I say that, Fortune will coin a term for the next generation.

Forrester makes some additional points that are worth noting:

There is pent up demand for smartphones. Only one in 10 information workers has a smartphone for work, but one in three agrees that they use a personal mobile phone for work purposes. Twenty-one percent of iWorkers would like to get email outside of work, and 15% would like email on a smartphone. Any way you slice it, this means that there is pent-up demand for smartphones at work.

It is amazing to me that still only 1 in 10 information workers has a smartphone for work.  Even more amazing: over the last couple of years I’ve seen Fortune 500 companies pull back their subsidies for smart-phones for work – essentially cutting off their information workers from company information during off-hours (and work hours while not at their desks).  The benefits of that connectivity confer primarily on the corporation, not on the employee, but apparently these firms felt that the costs outweighed the benefits.  In our business, we make sure that everyone has a smart phone.

In another note, Forrester points out that collaboration tools are stalling out – leaving email as (still) the primary collaboration platform.   Of course, this makes sense: everyone has email, even if they don’t use your particular email platform.  The standards for email are well-established and widespread.  But to use a collaboration platform, we have to ALL use the same collaboration platform.  For those who have received early invites to Google’s Wave, I’m sure you can relate:  being early into the collaboration platform is like having Instant Messaging with no one in your contact list.  Who exactly are you going to collaborate with?

This could mean that collaboration tools that leverage email will have an edge over new platforms.  It also means that collaboration tools that suit a particular niche (Business Process Modeling for example) are more likely to draw the appropriate audience than generic collaboration tools.

UPDATE 10/22: I just read this article about Gen Y preferring to keep email over social networks, and it just sounds like more confirmation to me of what I already believed- the generations aren’t fundamentally different in big swaths of people as the media prefers to portray them – the labels are a convenience and contrivance to talk about people “of a certain age” without specifying exactly what that age is.  There are some questions on the validity of the study, but it is still a reflection of the realities of life imposing on social networks once people reach maturity.

A pretty compelling demonstration of Google’s collaborative features in this article about “Gravity”, which is essentially a mashup of the ARIS modeler and Google’s Wave.

Its a great demonstration.  The biggest surprise, I think, was that this was something built by SAP- not exactly known for pioneering things like this.  There was a lot of buzz over twitter and blogs about how cool this is and how impressive it is – and I agree the demonstration is impressive – but maybe not for the reasons people think.  It isn’t, for example, an impressive bit of software engineering.  Mashups are, technically, relatively easy to execute compared to many other software applications – which is why there are so many mashups with Google Maps, for example.   I imagine Google has similar designs for Wave – and this is actually what I find impressive…but more on that in a minute. Right at this moment, Google Wave integration won’t help much – its not even in public Beta yet, so it isn’t something most companies or users could take advantage of.

If I’m not mistaken, what we’re seeing in this demo is that some folks at SAP have added collaborative features to their modeler (ARIS), by mashing with Google Wave.  That’s a great idea, and we can see how simple/straightforward it looks to be.  I can imagine other tools – Blueprint, Signavio, Appian Anywhere, Blueworks – can easily replicate this from a technical perspective.  There are some issues – like security- that these tools would have to consider if Google was going to be the means for collaboration – but at least one of these tools already has collaboration features at least as good as those shown in this demonstration (live chat, invitations, mutual simultaneous editing) – just not using Google Wave to do it.

What impressed me was Google Wave.  If one of the ideas behind Google Wave is to make it easy to add collaboration to enterprise applications – that could really enhance the quality of work going on in many collaborative business applications and processes – and it strikes at the heart of what Microsoft Sharepoint does for organizations, without the infrastructure requirements and “administrative” requirements.  And whereas Sharepoint is difficult to integrate into your business applications, Google Wave has an opportunity to lower the barriers and steal a march.  If anything, watching this demonstration made me hope our beta for Google Wave arrives sooner than later-  can’t wait to try it.

UPDATE 10/4/2009: Well I know I’ve been submitted for “consideration” for getting a Wave account, but I haven’t received an email yet from the Wave team inviting me to join.  There are some interesting early comments from people who have gotten access, however.  In particular Oscar Berg had an interesting and thoughtful take on Google Wave.

Update 10/6/2009: I just saw this article and youtube video. The article’s premise is that SalesForce is here demonstrating the value of Google Wave.  But it also proves the limitations… Good read..

Update 10/13/2009: A few more websites/ pages are up with useful and interesting Google Wave info.  Although, I have to admit, some of it sounds pretty funny like, “11 tools for Google Wave you’ve never heard of”  – well, that would be about any 11 tools for most people, wouldn’t it?

Google Wave 101 – this is a list of shortcuts, etiquette.  Its pretty basic, and a bit premature for my taste.

ActionBase Blog (have to add that to my reader) had a good post about how the BPM community has largely ignored the impact Wave could have on end-users… however, I’d point them to this post for evidence to the contrary… as well as mentioning the needed enterprise features to make this reality for large enterprises. ActionBase takes a different approach to process,  which I think is highly complementary to the traditional structured process approach.  I’d love to see them paired up with other BPMS offerings to really complete the picture.

Tips and Tricks from Techie-buzz.com.

Update 11/8/2009: More thoughts from ActionBase about Google Wave; primarily with regard to Wave potentially being a disruptive BPMS-like force in the BPM market.  I’ll post some more thoughts on that possibility this week, but I don’t see it as likely to disrupt established BPM vendors so much as the unstructured or user-driven vendors, as well as to further fragment the market currently served by Excel, Sharepoint, and Notes.

Update 11/30/2009:  The creator of Gmail chimes in with his view on Google Wave – and his best point is that it just isn’t ubiquitous like email, and therefore is unlikely to displace it.  He also has some good suggestions about preserving linearity or compartmentalizing some of the threads inside a wave.  Read on right here.

Update 1/24/2010: Anatoly comments on Google Wave, concluding that it is useful, and listing pros and cons. The cons he points out are interesting:

• No email/RSS notification of wave changes.
• No permanent address for the wave
• No numbered lists
• The requirement to register for google wave to participate. This last one is a big barrier to adoption because it means that you can’t arbitrarily include people in your waves. If you can’t include them, then you’re not likely to use Google Wave to collaborate with them…

Please feel free to add additional google wave links in the comment section… I’ll try to keep a compilation without working too hard at it.