Google Wave and HR

In 2004 (which in internet time is about 49 years ago), in a Harvard Business Review article titled Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?, the authors studied productivity and the effectiveness of team-based decision making in global, distributed teams.

One of the recommendations that came from the study was obvious, that modern, collaborative technologies must be utilized to support and enhance communication and collaboration for the purposes of problem-solving.  And way back in 2004, one of the specific findings was that e-mail should be used sparingly, if at all, as it has severe limitations as a collaborative technology. Additionally, the 'closed' nature of e-mail does not foster trust in distributed teams, particularly ones where the members are expected to collaborate for the first time and do not have a history or shared experiences to draw from.

So e-mail is generally lambasted as a collaboration tool. But for many project teams and organizations it remains the primary technology that supports team-based work.  Everyone has e-mail, everyone knows how to use it, and the barriers to adoption are at this point zero.

Other tools have emerged in the last few years that can in some form replace and improve upon e-mail, (wikis, group blogs, IM, Twitter, Yammer, among others), and have enjoyed varying levels of success in supporting distributed collaboration. But since the widespead adoption of e-mail as the so-called 'killer app', no single technology for collaboration has come close to supplanting e-mail as the main tool for employees and organizations to work together and share information, and to (gasp) foster innovation. Truly, since e-mail was created over thirty years ago, the corporate world has been waiting for the next 'killer app' for collaboration.

Perhaps that will be the lasting legacy of Google Wave.  Wave has been described as 'e-mail if it were invented today'. Wave, at least at first glance, seems to address and improve upon many of the shortcomings of e-mail, while certainly offering the promise of capability far superior to e-mail.  This video does an excellent job of explaining Wave in the context of e-mail 'replacement'.

Where e-mail tends to be 'private' between sender and receiver, Wave is much more open; anyone can be invited to see and participate in a Wave. Folks invited late to the conversation can use the 'replay' function to see just how the conversation developed and to get more of a flavor for the twists and turns in a problem solving process. The contents of the Wave itself are much more enduring, accessible, and portable than long e-mail message and response chains.  For all those reasons, and probably many more, Wave offers an exciting alternative to traditional e-mail collaboration. There have already been scores of posts explaining the various features of Wave, so I won't try to re-create that again here.

But I think another, perhaps more interesting question for HR and Talent professionals than whether or not Wave is 'better' than e-mail, is this one: What is the role of HR in the assessment and evaluation of tools that can increase employee collaboration, raise productivity, and foster innovation? 

When an interesting and potentially groundbreaking technology is created that has such potential in the workplace should the HR organization, the ones that are meant to be the leaders in helping to find and assess talent and to position that talent to ensure organizational success, be on the front lines of these technology discussions and tests? 

I think the answer is yes.

These evaluations and determinations of what technologies to try and implement in the workplace, particularly ones that may reach deeply in to the organization have to be influenced by HR's unique position as the 'talent' experts.

These decisions are too important to cede to the IT department.