In a previous blog post we stated that Google Wave was not yet ready for serious business use (after all it is still beta software). However, that does not mean you shouldn’t keep your eye on it!
The best article we’ve read regarding Wave and it’s potential was written by Jason Kolb on his blog.
If the technical jargon in Jason’s post throws you off at least read this excerpt from the link above:
Take CRM and ERP systems for example. Instead of customers emailing you about a sale and then sending purchase orders, it will be part of the “sale wave”. The entire sale, from start to finish, will be encapsulated in a single wave, bringing individuals in and out of the conversation as need. The ERP and CRM platforms themselves will be participants in this conversation, recognizing the purchase order, executing the workflow, processing the order, making the order details available to manufacturing or delivery in a sub-wave, and then making the receipt available to the customer and the sales team. Your CRM Whether you approve the purchase order from your desktop, your phone, or a point of sale device, makes no difference–they can all be directly addressed and participate in the conversation natively.
Jason is talking about Wave transforming your disparate business processes into a single unified conversation. Not only that, the participants in the conversation are not only people, but actual applications performing actions automatically as necessary!
As you can imagine, this would fundamentally change how business is done. We believe this is still a few years away, but the technology is coming. Be ready!
