One issue to consider when a new IT innovation is beginning to generate a wave of attention: What conferences are devoted to the innovation? Is attendance growing or declining, and at what rate?
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Over the last half century, managers have faced one wave of information technology innovation after another, each promising to change the way companies do business. Many of those innovations have: The sheer ubiquity of computing and communications devices and people’s devotion to their electronic devices bear witness to the transformation. Still, at any one point in time, an executive is likely to feel more or less inundated by the current wave, unsure of what all the commotion is about, unable to avoid the topic in everyday business conversation and suspicious that the latest gizmo is not the Next Big Thing but the Next Big Sell.
Some years ago, Neil Ramiller, in his doctoral research at UCLA, polled a number of managers about how they made sense of the new in IT. Most of them struggled. Initially, hopeful managers sooner or later grew disenchanted with the problems involved in the latest technology, whether it was electronic commerce or computer aided software engineering. One manager lamented, “I keep waiting for a silver bullet, a magic formula, an answer to all my prayers, and it never happens!” Yet, for that manager and most others, the promise of the newest IT never seemed to dim.1
Many economists and analysts have noted these adoption waves. In IT, the best-known observer is the technology assessment company Gartner, which formulated what it calls the “hype cycle” to describe how new IT innovations break upon the business scene in a wave-like, attention-grabbing fashion. In this model, each noteworthy new technology is portrayed as taking off and gathering mounting interest, only to reach a “peak of inflated expectations,” falling then into a “trough of disillusionment,” from which it slowly recovers to follow an upward “slope of enlightenment.” Since it was first introduced in 1995, the hype cycle
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It seems that the “wave” Dr. Swanson has caught is the Gartner Hype Cycle introduced in 1995. The Gartner Hype Cycle is used to illustrate and plan for the typical trajectory of a technology from when it is first triggered through when its expectations are inflated then deflated, to when its market perception becomes more enlightened and its adoption more productive and mainstream, then toward its potential decline & supplanting. (Ref:http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp) –Doug Laney, VP Research, Gartner, @doug_laney