The Digital Cloud

Since the release of Google Wave there has been a lot of talk about the interface and getting over this initial challenge to find the potential value.  As I have said before I think that the biggest value will be in shared document collaboration, but that as the tool matures and people innovate I am sure other uses will appear. 

Well that innovation is already happening. SAP have devloped a prototype Wave extension called Gravity that extends the document collaboration paradigm to collaborative Business Process Modelling (BPM). The video below shows it in action.

You could imagine working in a similar way as a cross domain/company virtual team to develop, improve and agree on work processes related to a Lean Six Sigma initiative or as part of the change management for the introduction of new technology for instance. 

Apart from providing an interesting view of BPM capability using the Wave paradigm of being able to have multiple users contibuting at the same time,  the video also does a good job of showing how people come and go during the course of a project. This highlights the importance and value of the playback feature for helping people get up to speed on ongoing work and discussions but also in helping document decisions. 

From a BPM perspective there is potential for Google Wave to be used to handle any activity that involves collaboration amongst people as part of a formal business process, for which it could maintains the complete record of discussion and decisions.

Already there are some interesting applications of Google Wave appearing. Do you know of any?