We’ve been overdue for a fundamental re-evaluation of organizational communication and collaboration approaches for at least 3 or 4 years. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Google partisan, but the dominant combination of the traditional management methodologies, MS Office stack, and regressive information management strategies has stifled innovations in team-based production models for years.

When I started doing social media consulting 3-years ago I quickly realized that to really take advantage of the collaborative, and distributed nature of social media my clients actually needed a specialist in organizational change management more than they needed a slick Facebook page. Paleolithic perspectives of collaboration are still holding organizations back from capturing the upside of new communication realities.

That’s about to change in a big way. Google Wave is one in a long lists of catalysts for a new era in collaboration, but in forcing the question and a re-evaluation of something as fundamental as email, its a big one.

On that note, I also disagree with this posts argument that “Upgrades to the Web are incremental” Wave is about collaboration, which means production, and in this country necessarily means competition. Competitive pressures will drive rapid adoption of new collaboration tools and methodologies faster than before.

Google Wave will be probably be buggy, it will probably disappoint, but I look forward to witnessing all the brains its going to blow in corporate HR and IT departments.