BPM & Google Wave..!!

My very personal view is that Google Wave is addressing a very advanced use-case, which might be only valid for a small number of geeks. When was the last time that you have used desktop sharing to simultanuously work on a document? My feeling is that realtime collaboration is somehow like the idea of virtual reality. Everyone says there is a bright future for this technology, but even after 20 years there are only few applications today.

Don't get me wrong. I think collaboration is important. But I doubt that you need realtime collaboration. Having a central repository where you can checkout and checkin documents (or models) is a proven approach, which is successfully used in many projects. It is also the idea of ARIS Business Server and many competing products. If I need realtime collaboration, usually I just use the phone.

I would like to know the answer to Parveen's question. 

Few months ago I had the opportunity to collaborate with 3 to 5 people from different organizations. All of we were at different cities (I was the only one in other country) using Skype Chat and Google Docs. Maybe this case isn't exactly a "real time collaboration" on a document because eventually we have to do a manual refresh, but it was very close.

Note: One of the benefits that we found of using the chat instead of the phone, was the automatically generation of the "chat log" and all of the participants had a copy instantly :) .

At least I would like to have available in Aris Express a "one click to refresh a shared model" button, assuming that the shared model could be embedded in Google Docs/Wave or similar tools.

In the past Desktop Sharing or screen sharing were not an option for me because in my organization the screen update was to slowly caused by the low bandwith and  because this requires to have the same software in the computers of all the participants.

Regards,

Ruben

Hi,

I remember a very interesting article about Google Wave. The conclusion was: it is a combination of the worst features of mail and chat.

Can you really imagine working in real time with multiple persons on the same business process, and only supported by chat?

How efficient is this? Every user has a phone normally in reach, and doing a conference call does not cost much, but increases the productivity of the collaboration extremely.

In our experience (and we're doing a lot of international conference calls), online application or desktops sharing with voice communication is much much much more efficient then chatting. Especially, when the topic to be discussed is something that important like a business process, where a single error in a process could cost a huge amount of money.

Therefore, in my opinion, chat could never replace personal contact. If I was the process owner, I would extremely appreciate if everybody in the team could discuss the current topic and not botch around on each and every corner of "my" process.

I've seen the gravity prototype also. Oh dear.

One example was something like "now one colleague is getting an invitation, who is sitting in another room of the building...". Must be a nice company, where people do not like to speak with there colleagues in another room of the same building... and an in-house call does not cost a cent, right?

Do not get me wrong: a collaboration functionality is a really great feature of a BPM tool, but, hey, I do not believe chatting is the solution.

Bye,

Frank

Hi All,

I can see some interesting thoughts.

Before going ahead let me clear the objectives of the discussion, here I am not marketing Google Wave :) However I am intersted in the fundamental thoughts of Google wave: "Real Time Communication and Collaboration for BPM". Since Collaboration is a key concept of process discovery thought of checking the innovation with reference to BPM.

The Use case can be implemented by BPMS vendors in their own way, Lombardi is coming up with its "Blueprints", SAP is coming up with Gravity or so.

The important thing here is that, is this innovation of any help to BPM? If not what is missing? and if by chance this feature is helpful how we can utilize it to best? There is another option i.e. This feature is of no use in BPM :)

It is very much right to say that Google Wave is a Good dream, but in practical how to make that dream come true that might seemed to be funny. And thats where I am trying to fill the gap b/w dream and practicality.

@Frank: I think Google wave will support voice chat as well. Definately its better to see the participant in person than chat but if not possible, atleast voice chat is better option than not to see at all.

Hope nobody taking me wrong here :)

Cheers

Parveen

Hi,

actually I think such an integration would be very handy. But opposed to the discussion so far  the interessting point is not to have a chat (voice video) included but to have the changelog of the model. We know such revision histories very well from VCS but Google Wave integrates this very well with every day applications. I think its not only about realtime collaboration but also about to inspect the evolution of process models.

Hi,

We can see the development of Google Wave as a step towards the integration of Social Networking and BPM too.

Having a gadget on ARIS  community which enables you to collaborate with the ARIS experts, isn't a good idea??

I got a dream of using Runtime environment of ARIS Express in ARIS community for one of my process, something like SAP gravity on Google Wave.  I am not sure how much sense I am making in this dream but thought of sharing.

Cheers

Parveen

Hi Parveen,

I agree with you that such collaboration features would make sense. The ARIS community is developing and I expect that first collaborative features will be introduced in an acceptable timeframe.

To realize your dream might take a bit longer because many questions have to be clarified before, but it's an interesting scenario and we should keep it in mind.

Regards

Uwe

I just received my Google Wave invitation and played around with it and see some potential in a BPM project. I agree with Frank that you need the personal contact to develop an initial model (but how inpersonal is a conf call...), but once a team is in a productive state -remember the steps of group performance: norming / storming / performing- collaboration tools like Wave can kick in.

On one project for example we had long Excel checklists for QA and send them back an forth to coordinate the own development, the central QA team and other dev teams. We did this via email and it was a nightmare, because you couldn't publish the email content easily and we didn't have the change history of the decisions which lead to the model changes.

A Wave attached to the QA checklist.would have been very helpful.

In general I would welcome more collaboration features in ARIS; e.g. RSS feed of model changes (river of news), a case tracker for QA, or wiki pages (per model) where you can add additional information.

Nobody can deny the power of social networking and BPM, which provides the rich internet interaction and that too with personalization. Aris community is the best example I can say.

I think the creamy layer of the best of social networking features like wikis (provides collaborative authoring), blogs, polls and surveys could be of a perfect dish with BPM, if used well :)

Though it all might be possible with different - different tools, we need to check which is the best.

Google wave might be one from the list.

Thanks

Parveen

@ Stephan, there is a change log already. And when it comes to BPM integration, SAP Gravity is not a bad example for a start though a bit naive in that first YouTube demo.

This is a very interesting discussion. I agree with Sebastion about the real time collaboration actual potential. However, for me the potential of GoogleWave is NOT in the real time collaboration at all. Being a real-time mash-up with collaboration playback is much more important.

By the way I wouldn't mind if discussions here capabilities like Google Waves :)

Cheers

Ivo

 Hi All,

The best part of Google wave as of now I feel for BPM point of view is to see the real time discovery and evolution of your processes with a feature like Playback. On top of it if you can reuse your efforts as in gravity they are providing the feature using processes in SAP Netweaver nothing can be better than that.

I am totally agree that we might not be as mature to implement the exact use case, but yes there is some real potential in it for BPM.

Just imagine the scenario that you arranged a workshop for defining a process and you have only whiteboard and some markers with you (You might be having some extra things :)). On the other side how about the same workshop in google wave. I am really thinking from the point of capturing the minutes of workshop, so that while working on the process I can really think of each and every point or concern raised by the participants. 

Thanks 

Parveen

Parveen,

  I couldn't agree more. I think Google Wave can will turn out to be a great complement to BPM, especially for unstructured, adhoc processes. I have been blogging about it for a while at: http://blog.actionbase.com/can-google-wave-become-a-disruptive-good-enough-bpms

Hi Jacob,

I am in line with your thought that Google Wave can be a nice add on to your BPMS. But that point is that Industry is not became that mature technically to implement such a high end use case at present.

Theoretically it seems wonderful use case to work with but if you are trying to find how much users actually using that, probably list is very small.

Cheers