Information Research Weblog

Thursday's Guardian Online magazine usually brings something interesting to my notice and this time it has drawn attention to the Gartner corporation's 'hype cycle'. The link to the 2005 hype cycle report in the Guardian doesn't actually work, but you can find the paper with a little trouble - or, if you read this Weblog, no trouble at all.

Gartner's hype cycles:

...highlight the relative maturity of technologies across a wide range of IT domains, targeting different IT roles and responsibilities. Each Hype Cycle provides a snapshot of the position of technologies relative to a market, region or industry, identifying which technologies are hyped, which are suffering the inevitable disillusionment and which are stable enough to allow for a reasonable understanding of when and how to use them appropriately

The cycle shows the following stages: Trigger Technology (e.g., in 2005 Quantum Computing), Peak of Inflated Expections (e.g., Biometric Identity Documents), Trough of Disillusionment (e.g., Tablet PC), Slope of Enlightenment (e.g., VoIP), and Plateau of Productivity (e.g., Internal Web Services). Much of the detail on this is only available to paying clients, but the general information is interesting enough.