Using the Hype Cycle to your advantage

One of the topics that came up at last week’s SoloCamp was the use of the Gartner developed Hype Cycle. Regardless of your personal views on this, I’m with Vinnie when he says:

The Hype Cycle has always been a good snapshot on what is emerging/maturing at the market level. But do you see clients use it on a periodic basis to reshuffle their IT investment priorities?

At a more practical level, when freelancers ask me where we are in adoption of particular technologies that might come into the hype cycle I have to remember that what Gartner is considering is not where I may be but where business in general may be. So for example, Suw Charman-Anderson noted that the ideas encompassing ’social anything’ just don’t fly in business. This is something I have said for a long time but it hasn’t stopped the social media mavens carrying on parroting the term.At the same time, I often make the mistake of assuming everyone knows about Twitter. 99.9% of people don’t.

Similarly, when the Silicon Valley blogerati declare one or other technology to be so-2007 (2006 etc), you can be pretty certain it’s on its way into the trough of disillusionment. The difficulty for many of the mavens is they have little or no clue how to operate on that side of the hype cycle. that’s why they concentrate almost solely on the upswing. Back to Vinnie who asked Jackie Fenn some pointed questions:

In your career at Gartner, which technologies would you say Gartner missed in its Hype cycles - either positioned too early or completely missed and emerged in to a market category?

I’m not sure there’s much we’ve missed completely, but the consumer internet technologies (eg instant messaging, social platforms) tend to explode virally very rapidly, particularly compared to the rate that things move in the enterprise world, so they tend to be further along when we start to plot them on the hype cycle.

Maybe so but they’re still a decent guide. Read Jackie’s book to discover more. The links below add furhter context.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Gartner 2008 Hype Cycle
• Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies
• Gartner fuels Enterprise 2.0 too
• A Look to the Last Decade With Gartner Hype Cycles
• Gartner throws weight behind enterprise Web 2.0
• Where Are We In The Hype Cycle?
• Yammer Gets Bronx Cheers from the Blogosphere. Why?
• Microblogging to be Key Emerging Trend Among Businesses | Microblink
• Green issues baffling IT users