How I would design a forms workflow system for google wave

Yesterday, I posted a quick reply to a post on the google wave developer blog about creating a form based workflow system for google wave.  I was quite busy at the time and i think in my haste I may have been a bit brusque.    By way of making amends, here is how I would set up such a system.

A forms workflow engine needs a number of components in order to operate correctly.  In particular:

1. A way of specifying relationships between people.  The Manager-Employee relationship is probably the most important here, but there are others too (like whom is in the HR department).
2. A way of specifying what information is needed in the form.  What fields, how they are validated, that sort of thing.  Calculated fields would be important here.
3. A way of specifying the workflow for the form, and working out which relationships to use and which form to use in that workflow.
4. A way for a participant in a group to select which form he wants to fill in.  A particular person may be engaged in multiple organisations, so having a single form library to choose from isn't enough

All of this could be managed in Google Wave, but it would not be trivial.  If set up correctly, it could work quite smoothly however.  First, we need a bot that performs multiple functions, or multiple bots that co-operate to provide the functions listed above.  I think it would be more understandable for users to just have one bot, so lets use that model.  For the purposes of this discussion, I'll call it FormBot.

Next, we need a way of creating the models that are specified above.  An operator would create a wave, tag it with its function (so that the bot can tell what purpose the wave serves) and then adds FormBot to the wave.  FormBot adds a gadget to the wave which allows the operator to edit the data.

For the relationship diagram, the gadget/bot combo would be able to work out which users they were dealing with by looking at the participants of the wave.  This effectively becomes your personnel database, in lieu of having it hooked up to an LDAP server.  The gadget would then allow the operator to drop people into relationships.  The robot would detect any changes, and then suck up the information into its own database (this bit is quite important, as it is how the bot, when processing an instance of a form, will be able to find the information in needs).

The Form & Workflow models are linked together in a one-one relationship, so they can be added on another wave, this time tagged with workflowmodel.  There would be a couple of gadgets to allow the models to be edited, which are then sucked into the database again.

So finally, how does the bot process an instance of a workflow form?  A user would have an extension installed on his client which adds an entry to the "new wave" menu which would say "New Form".  This would create a new wave and add FormBot.  FormBot would check its database to see what Form Waves it has which are linked to relationship models with the user as a participant.  It would then present these as a list to the user to allow him to choose which form he wanted to fill in.  The Bot would then create the form and allow the user to edit it and progress through the workflow.  

In summary, what we've done here is create a couple of setting waves that the bot uses to configure the application, and to allow it to provide different form libraries to different groups of people.  I think its quite elegant and would work really well.  There'd be a lot of work to get it implemented though.  The gadgets to allow the editing of the models would be the key bit.  I'd love to do it but I doubt I'll find enough time to do it myself.  I did create a proof of technology some time ago, but it wasn't configurable, nor did it hook up to a proper user database.

Google wants a workflow engine/robot for wave too.

Google just posted on their Wave Developer Blog that their "wishlist" would have on it a way to process document workflow using google wave.  This reminds me of a post I wrote a while back on what google wave could be used for.  I did a proof of concept, but taking the concept to production would take too much effort for one guy in his spare time.  Probably the biggest barrier is integrating with HR systems.  How does the system plug into your corporate HR system to work out who your manager is when you post?

Either way, its good to see that other people see the same value in wave that I do.

Using Google Wave for Workflow tasks

I've been thinking over the last few days about what Google Wave could be used for. Obviously it can be used as a document collaboration and review platform. It can also be used as a multi-user chat program, although there are probably other existing programs that are just as good for managing that. Some people have claimed that it isn't anything revolutionary. In and of itself, this is true, as it just takes concepts already available in email, instant messaging and collaborative documents and puts them together. What I'm more interested in now however is what we can do with it now that it has brought those technologies together.

In a blog post, Daniel tenner quite succinctly outlines where Google Wave will be useful, and primarily its going to be used by people working together. Why couldn't we use it to do workflow related stuff too, especially when there is an automated component to it? I decided to look at how we could do leave forms. The first question I asked was "why would you want to do leave forms in wave?". There are already web applications for doing workflow. The problem that I see with that is that they are still fairly rigid in their operation. Whenver your manager is on leave or you want to go slightly outside the pre-defined workflow thats there the procedure becomes very brittle and you need to go to a user with superuser access to get things done. In addition to this, all notifications that you have new forms to attend to or that the status has changed go out by email. Email shouldn't be a notification system. We just use it that way because its familiar, and it is the tool that we spend most of our time in.

Assuming that google wave becomes popular enough that we use it each day, wouldn't it be nice if the workflow/collaboration tool entered into our messaging tool. That way we wouldn't need to log into a separate tool to manage things. It would be there in front of us, and allow us to deal with the situation immedaitely.

To test this theory, and also to play with Google Wave bots, I have written an extension to Google wave, which gives users the option to create a Leave application in google wave. Interestingly enough, I found it easiest to document the procedure directly in Wave, which would make it very easy to introduce new users to our procedures. The procedure wave is available at Leave Application Procedure. One nice thing about this is that if HR needs to change the procedure, It automatically pops back up in people's inbox so that they see the changes. There's no need for notifications to be sent out, as the change to the document (to which everyone is subscribed) automatically gets distributed. Likewise, if a staff member has a question on the procedure, it can be asked directly in the wave itself (privately if necessary) to provide context to the conversation.

When a user creates a new leave form wave, it automatically includes a bot which is responsible for progressing the wave through the workflow. This is done by a series of buttons (or actions) at the bottom of the document which take the standard approval route (Draft -> Submitted -> Approved -> Processed). It is flexible however, as anyone that needs to deviate from the process, say to get additional approval from another team leader because he is to another team, can simply add the other team leader to the wave and have a chat. All of the context associated with the process are kept with the wave, and it can easily be searched later on to see what happens.

Its also possible for the bot to take a greater role in the process itself. It can check leave balances (assuming that the leave system is available to it), add leave to the company leave calendar, and any number of other integration tasks because it is the thing that is managing the workflow itself. Its very flexible, easy to change, and completely under the control of the organisation. One thing I played with was getting the bot to understand (as best as bots can) natural language. If you wanted to query your leave balance for example you could start a wave with the bot and ask it "What is my leave balance". It would could then look up your balance and reply. This would be able to free up HR staff from having to perform mundane tasks. Obviously bots have got a long way to go before they can understand our language properly, but if queries conform to simple grammar rules then it should work.

If anyone would like to have a play with what I have written, let me (brucejcooper@googlewave.com) know and I will add you to the procedure wave, which will allow you to install the extension and create a dummy leave application. It puts me in as the approver for everyone (except for me, for whom it uses another bloke) as their manager. Only the manager can approve/reject a timesheet. If you say anything to the bot, it replies with a message about your leave balance (which is bogus. the bot isn't connected to our HR system).

What does everyone think? Is this a good idea for managing workflow? Until we have broader access for people to get on Wave it will be difficult to tell, but I think it is a good use.

P.S. I wrote this post in Wave originally, but had to copy and paste it here because the embedding API doesn't allow anonymous viewing yet.  Google Wave is great, but it is still definitely a beta product.

UPDATE: I've created a screencast demonstration of how the flow will work.  Remember this is intended as a proof of concept rather than the full thing, but it gets the point across.