Yesterday the
company released its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies,
assessing the maturity, impact and adoption speed of 44
technologies and trends over the coming decade.
Carbon nanotubes and speech recognition, service-oriented
architecture and RFID also feature in the Hype Cycle which charts
the progression of an emerging technology from conception, to
market over-enthusiasm, through a period of disillusionment, to an
eventual understanding of the technology's relevance and role in a
market or domain.
As such, the Hype Cycle provides a valuable aid to strategic
planners who advise their organisations on the adoption of emerging
technologies.
The Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle is just one of 68 hype
cycles released by Gartner in 2005. More than 1,600 information
technologies and trends across more than 60 markets, regions and
industries are evaluated by more than 300 Gartner analysts in the
most comprehensive assessment of technology maturity in the IT
industry.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Gartner's Hype Cycle,
which was first introduced as a commentary on the common pattern of
human response to technology. Says Jackie Fenn, Gartner Fellow and
creator of the first Emerging Technology Hype Cycle in 1995: "The
pattern resonated so deeply with technology planners, that we
received requests the following year for an update." So updates
have been published every year since.
Alexander Linden, a research vice president at Gartner,
acknowledges that the IT industry is awash with hype and buzz
words. Gartner's Hype Cycles endeavour to cut through this to offer
an independent overview of the relative maturity of technologies in
any given domain. "It provides not only a scorecard to separate
hype from reality, but also models that help enterprises to decide
when they should adopt a new technology," he said.
Invest now or later?
According to Linden, companies can feel compelled to invest
prematurely in a technology because it is being hyped or,
conversely, they may ignore a technology just because it is not
living up to early expectations. He urged organisations to be
selectively aggressive in identifying technologies that could be
beneficial to their business and evaluate these earlier in the Hype
Cycle.
"For technologies that will have lower impact on your business,
let others learn the difficult lessons, and then adopt the
technologies when they are more mature," Linden said. "It's less a
matter of don't believe the hype and more a case of do believe the
hype but only in the wider context of the market place, potential
applications and ultimately the relevance to your business today
and tomorrow."
Key themes to monitor
The Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle covers the entire IT
spectrum, but Gartner has identified three key technology themes
businesses should watch as well as highlighting some of the
individual technologies in those areas. Technologies that will
enable the development of Collaboration, Next Generation
Architecture and Real World Web are highlighted as being
particularly significant.
Collaboration
A number of key collaboration technologies designed to improve
productivity and ultimately transform business practices are
identified in the Hype Cycle:
Podcasting: podcasting offers a way to
'subscribe' to radio programmes and have them delivered to your PC.
Gartner predicts that podcasting subscriptions will grow
increasingly important as the market for content continues to
fragment, which will lead to a massive shift in radio, and
ultimately TV content delivery. Podcasting is an extremely
efficient method for delivering audio and spoken-word content to
niche audiences and as such could become an important corporate
communications tool.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Voice over IP (VoIP):
Vendor-proprietary P2P VoIP applications are under development
although security concerns still need to be addressed. Services
like Skype currently enjoy significant consumer adoption and are
beginning to make inroads into the business landscape. Gartner
predicts that the technology will be important for collaborative
and multimedia applications as well as low-cost communications.
Desktop Search: Also known as personal
knowledge search, this is an individual productivity application,
residing on the desktop and using local processing power to provide
search-and-retrieve functionality for the desktop resident's local
email, data store and documents. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are
competing for customer attention, adding to the hype; but customers
are not exhibiting much interest in buying solutions. However,
desktop search will become a standard feature in Microsoft
Longhorn, currently planned for 2006, and should reduce content
recreation, increase content reuse whilst raising productivity.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS): RSS is a
simple data format that enables websites to inform subscribers of
new content and distribute content more efficiently by bypassing
the browser via RSS reader software. RSS is widely used for
syndicating weblog content but its corporate use is only starting
to be tapped for activities such as corporate messaging. Its
simplicity makes it easy to implement and add to established
software systems. Gartner predicts that RSS will be most useful for
content that is 'nice to know' rather than 'need to know'.
Corporate Blogging: This involves the use of
online personal journals by corporate employees, either
individually or in a group, to further company goals. It reached
the peak of hype in 2004, although mainstream firms have not yet
become involved. Its impact will be on projecting corporate
marketing messages primarily and secondarily in competitive
intelligence, customer support and recruiting.
Wikis: A simple, text-based collaborative
system for managing hyperlinked collections of web pages. Wiki is
an acronym for "What I Know Is". A wiki usually enables users to
change pages or comments created by other users. Wikis are becoming
available from commercial vendors, in addition to many open-sourced
products, but not yet from established enterprise vendors. However,
they are widely used as collaborative, distributed authoring
systems for online communities, especially those using open-source
projects. Gartner predicts that Wikis will impact ad hoc
collaboration, group authoring, content management, web site
management, innovation, project execution and research and
development.
Next Generation Architecture
David Cearly, another research vice president at Gartner,
believes that Next Generation Architecture will constitute the
third big era in the IT industry's history (the first having been
the hardware era and second belonging to software). These emerging
technologies will form key pillars of the new architecture:
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): SOA uses
interactive business components designed to be meaningful, usable
and useful across application or enterprise boundaries. Despite the
current disillusionment with SOA, Gartner expects support for SOA
to grow and for it to mature as a technology within 10 years
although many changes in user and vendor organisations and
technologies are required before SOA reaches its full potential.
However, in the longer term, Gartner believes that SOA has the
potential to be transformational to a business.
Web Services-Enabled Business Models: These
productivity-boosting models represent a new approach to doing
business among enterprises and consumers that would not have been
possible without the benefits of web-services. However, enterprises
are still wrestling with what web services will do and Gartner
believes that the potentially transformational impact of Web
Services-Enabled Business Models will have to wait for more-mature
standards and clearer examples.
Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL):
This is an Extensible-Markup-Language-defined standard for
analysing, exchanging and reporting financial information. XBRL
helps organizations meet multiple financial reporting needs through
a single instance of financial data. It also improves the
timeliness and accuracy of financial and regulatory reporting,
validation and distribution. XBRL enables integration, aggregation,
validation and comparison of financial data. It also automates
sourcing and the review of financial data for activities such as
loan acceptances, investment portfolio management and risk reviews.
Financial accounting software vendors are already incorporating
XBRL and regulatory and transparency pressures increase the
significance and likelihood of XBRL adoption. However, there have
been setbacks in XBRL adoption in the past year; the most
significant have been delays in the FDIC and FSA projects that will
mandate XBRL reporting.
Business Process Platforms (BPP): BBP provide
business process flexibility and adaptability. They use SOA design
principles and are metadata and model driven. Gartner believes that
Business Process Platforms will enable business process fusion and
move innovation from business application vendors to BPP
ecosystems. Ultimately they will replace customised business
applications and custom development by extending core applications
platforms with composite applications.
Real World Web
Jackie Fenn believes that adding networking, sensing and
processing to real-world objects and places is creating a
'Real-World-Web' of information that will enhance business and
personal decision-making. Ms Fenn highlighted three technologies
from the 2005 Hype Cycle that will help to make this a reality:
Location-aware applications: These are mobile
enterprise applications that exploit the geographical position of a
mobile worker or an asset, mainly through satellite positioning
technologies like Global Positioning System (GPS) or through
location technologies in the cellular network and mobile devices.
Real-world examples include fleet management applications with
mapping navigation and routing functionalities, government
inspections and integration with geographic information system
applications. Mobile workers will use either a PDA or smartphone,
connected via Bluetooth to an external GPS receiver, or stand-alone
positioning wireless device.
Radio Frequency Identification (Passive):
Otherwise known as RFID, passive Radio Frequency Identification has
been somewhat over-hyped in recent years, although vehicle-based
systems are strong. It involves the tagging of very small chips to
arbitrary types of objects. These chips transform the energy of
radio signals into electricity then respond by sending back
information that is stored on the chip. The most conducive
environments for passive RFID are chaotic or unstructured business
processes where RFID's ability to read without a direct line of
sight gives it the edge over traditional bar-coding methods. These
might include such diverse activities as manufacturing, healthcare,
logistics, animal tracking and laundry automation.
Mesh Networks – Sensor: Mesh Networks are ad
hoc networks formed by dynamic meshes of peer nodes, each of which
includes simple networking, computing and sensing capabilities.
Potential impact areas include low-cost industrial sensing and
networking, low-cost zero management networking, resilient
networking, military sensing, product tagging and building
automation.
Ms Fenn concluded that although the specific technologies change
over the years, the Hype Cycle's underlying message endures. "Don't
invest in a technology just because it is being hyped or ignore a
technology just because it is not living up to early over
expectations," she said. "If a technology fits with your overall
business strategy you should be evaluating it from the outset, if
you are unsure, wait until more research is available."
Looking back to 1995
Looking back over 10 years of Hype Cycles, Ms Fenn reflected how
the technologies on the 1995 Hype Cycle have evolved. "Wireless
communications have exploded into hundreds of underlying
technologies, standards and applications, and the information
superhighway has manifested itself through the internet and World
Wide Web to drive ubiquitous information access, new forms of
community and whole industries built around online commerce," she
said. "However, some technologies didn't fare so well;
videoconferencing, handwriting recognition and speech recognition
are still featured 10 years later on the 2005 Emerging Technologies
Hype Cycle as they struggle toward mainstream adoption."
About the Gartner Hype Cycles
Gartner's Hype Cycles assess the maturity, impact and adoption
speed of hundreds of technologies across a broad range of
technology, application and industry areas. It highlights the
progression of an emerging technology from market over enthusiasm
through a period of disillusionment to an eventual understanding of
the technology's relevance and role in a market or domain.
The Hype Cycle is an educational tool that helps explain why
technologies should be adopted based on your individual needs and
goals, rather than on the generic levels of hype and
disillusionment in the marketplace.
You can view the 1995 and 2005 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycles
by clicking the thumbnails in this page.
Gartner's Hype Cycle Model follows five stages:
Technology Trigger: A breakthrough, public
demonstration, product launch or other event generates significant
press and industry interest.
Peak of Inflated Expectations: During this
phase of over enthusiasm and unrealistic projections, a flurry of
well-publicized activity by technology leaders results in some
successes, but more failures, as the technology is pushed to its
limits. The only companies making money are conference organizers
and magazine publishers.
Trough of Disillusionment: Because the
technology does not live up to its over-inflated expectations, it
rapidly becomes unfashionable. Media interest wanes, except for a
few cautionary tales.
Slope of Enlightenment: Focused experimentation
and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range of
organizations lead to a true understanding of the technology's
applicability, risks and benefits. Commercial, off-the-shelf
methodologies and tools ease the development process.
Plateau of Productivity: The real-world
benefits of the technology are demonstrated and accepted. Growing
numbers of organizations feel comfortable with the reduced levels
of risk, and the rapid growth phase of adoption begins.
