Google Wave and ECM

I just finished watching the demo video for Google Wave and all I can say is WOW.  If it works as well as they say it does it could revolutionize the way people communicate.  But the key question for me is how will this affect the business world, and because of a question someone posted on LinkedIn my first thought went to how this will change enterprise content management.  My answer is I don’t think Wave will.  But I think the ideas from it could be groundbreaking.

One of the most interesting things about Wave is that it allows you to create documents by combining various communications and editing individual messages.  It’s kind of like a combination of a wiki, an email system and IM.  You can tag any of the messages that go into a wave allowing you to find individual pieces of the thread later on.  Its these elements that in my mind could revolutionize disposition of documents and records.

If documents are created in Wave obviously the final document will have a retention period based on its content.  The various content used to create the document will have various retentions based on how it fits into the process.  Some will be working papers, but others may not be.  If big bucket or another retention that allows for general retention categories were used, tags could be applied to the specific content within a wave and that content could be deleted at the appropriate time, leaving the rest of the wave available for reference and for audit and discovery.  Some training would be required to get staff to tag content properly as they created it, but this would provide much more control than is currently available in managing email, IM and other communications.

Anyhow, that's my initial take on Google Wave's impact on ECM.  I'm sure I'll have more thoughts once I actually try it out, but since I'm not a developer I'll have to wait a bit.  In the meantime I look forward to hearing other thoughts on how Wave will impact the business world.