So I finally watched the Google Wave video and came away quite impressed. The concept is essentially the mash up of email, wiki’s and instant messaging into one real-time application. It should replace consumer email as the de-facto standard in a few years but it will take much more to crack the enterprise. The Google team used enterprise examples throughout the presentation, but it’s not ready for the enterprise and here’s why.

First and most importantly, security and governance was either completely left out or is non-existent. The ability to post a wave (essentially an intelligent page that exists wherever you place it) on any internal or external site will automatically eliminate it from most of the Global 3000. No business minded professional is going to allow a wave outlining the latest company project to be posted on the Huffington Post. It’s a huge security issue (can you say Sarbanes Oxley) and one that needs to be addressed.

Second, similar to an ocean of activity – how will each of the waves be tracked and managed? There don’t appear to be any reporting features on Waves, so a business manager will need to open each Wave to track the results or understand what business issues were addressed. The enterprise can create Waves, but how do we learn from the Waves? How do we share those learnings with the rest of the corporation?

Third, the ability to integrate waves with enterprise data is important. Waves will produce a much higher ROI if they allow users to collaborate around business data that helps business managers make decisions. For example, if I could pull in data from my CRM system that illustrates the sales results of a marketing campaign run in Europe; then get a US team to start a wave with the European team to better understand how they achieved the results. That scenario is much more beneficial to the enterprise and will achieve quick ROI.

Lastly, what are the ramifications of having two Google Waves with similar subjects and content? It wasn’t clear whether I could combine the waves or cut and paste from one wave to the other. I would not want to recreate the content from Wave A to Wave B especially if they had different team members. Why is this important? Ostensibly Enterprise Waves allow collaboration around business issues. Losing part of the content or having disjointed Waves disrupts the collaboration process which leads to sub-optimal results. Seems petty on the surface but when taken at an aggregate level it could have high impact.

Since Google Wave is open source, some enterprising company can and will fill these gaps. For now, Google Wave appears to be a consumer tool with limited enterprise appeal.

Do you agree or disagree with above, have comments, please chime in.

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