Adios to Google Wave! RIP!

For those not plugged into the news continuum that is the Internet, it may be news to some that last week Google has announced that it is to stop its collaborative tool Google Wave.

According to this Google post they had the following to say…

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser.

They go on to say that ….

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication…

…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 like Buzz.

As a early adoptor I found it interesting and very innovative. However, early on it became apparent that it was a very technical and feature rich application that only techies really knew what to do with. If anything Wave was too far ahead of its time and perhaps had too many features that confused users.

In short, it can be described as ‘a solution waiting for a problem’. Just think if it was as good at predicting the future as keeping track of the past….

Many times innovation and failure is not a bad thing. It usually provides the impetus to spawn other ideas and solutions that find a greater and more fertile audience in other areas. Any ideas on what they plan on coming up with next?

BPM Centre of Excellence – Strategic & Tactical Value Explained

Foreword: Having recently completed the design and implementation of an operational BPM Competency Centre for a Global Insurance company, I thought I would share a bit of my recent experience on the subject. The Competency Centre initiative formed part of the extremely ambitious IT and Business Transformation programme that is fundamental in redefining the organisation and laying the foundation for its expansion strategy across Europe.

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Over the decades, the search for IT and/or Business ‘Excellence’ has led to a concept that is often misunderstood and can be very amorphous in definition and execution – Business/IT Transformation.

A term also commonly used in the same context is that of a Centre of Excellence or ‘CoE’ aka ‘Competency Centre.’  In this post, I will not attempt to redefine either, but rather explain a bit more about how the various constituent parts of a CoE can support Transformation projects and more specifically Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives.

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The purpose of a CoE is to act as a nucleus for promoting and managing the collaboration of people, processes and technologies around key organisational objectives by ensuring the application of best practices, education and training, support services and technology awareness.

In most organisations, this is an extremely complex challenge, especially if the level of organisational maturity is low and their existing operational model is disjointed. That said, more mature and integrated organisations find the exigency and necessary focus for adopting a CoE a challenge.