Continued from part 6: social network platform.
Unlike e-mail Google Wave allows for third-party tools to be integrated into the architecture. Gadgets and robots are first-class citizens.
This will create an abundance of third-party additions, both gadgets and robots. Especially current enterprise software vendors will seize the opportunity and build gadgets and robots to integrate the processes they offer into waves. In fact, Wave could prove the ideal platform for the execution of business processes.
Today designing business processes is a tedious endeavor. You don’t only need to design the processes, you also need to deploy them and slap the user interfaces on top of them. The combination of participants, wavelets, gadgets and robots enables anybody who cares to do so to build business processes that are based on crowd sourcing more than anything else.
Here’s a short example:
To all participating realtors, Mr. and Ms. Hazelwood are looking to buy a holiday home in our region. They want a rustic house in good condition with two bedrooms. View on the beach is not required but house has to be in walking distance of the beach. Their budget is $100,000. They want us to propose three properties.
The most obvious thing to do at this point is to add a robot to the wave which adds a gadget where participants can add houses for sale from an external database that match the criteria.
Once a consensus is reached among the participants they can create new wave addressed to the Hazelwoods with an overview of the three proposed properties. In that wave the Hazelwoods can then discuss with a representative when to visit the properties.
In the original wave a deadline can be set – by adding another robot – by which all three properties have to be visited by the Hazelwoods or the lead is automatically closed.
This kind of automation – where waves generate metadata through crowd sourcing that drives other systems – is going to be big. It removes the need to build complex user interfaces which typically delay small changes to IT systems with many months. Instead small gadgets and robots are needed which interface with back-end business process systems that keep track of the actual processes.
Most of the time people are familiar enough with processes, and when things go awry or aren’t moving the business process system through its robot can intervene and alert participants of the detected issues.
The potential for productivity gains is enormous. Third-party extensions and integrations with Google Wave are going to be a big market. Where nobody can keep track of e-mail threads it’s much easier to – automatically – keep track of waves.
This is the last part of this series of posts on Google Wave. I hope you’ve enjoyed them. The traffic for these articles has been huge. I enjoy writing about Google Wave but I’m not sure if anything remains to be said before the actual release of Wave.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to working with Google Wave and building extensions.
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