Anticlue

Hype Cycle

Ever hear of a Hype Cycle? Before today, I hadn't so I did a little research at the gartner site.

A Hype Cycle is a graphical representation of the adoption and risks cycle of an application versus the hype that surrounds it.

There are five phases of the cycle

• Technology Trigger


• Peak of Inflated Expectations


• Trough of Disillusionment


• Slope of Enlightenment


• Plateau of Productivity

In order to minimize risk to the infrastructure and business community, one can use the hype cycle to help evaluate when to jump onto the bandwagon as detailed in this article here.

I don't think the hype cycle is to limit innovation. The purpose of the hype cycle seems to be a mechanism to evaluate where in the technological lifecycle the return is greatest and the risk is minimized.

For instance, Central was just released this morning. It is a great idea to separate the presentation from the service layer of an application. However, I'm not going to develop a central application to do bed management with in the hospital next week. I'm going to wait a little while, let others find the issues first. Then when I see a non critical process that could benefit from a central solution, I will recommend it. After we get a little education and experience under our belts, then we can look at that technology as a solution for a more visible application such as bed management.

A better example is we are evaluating vendor applications to do wiki. We have several applications:

1. A Client Server vb 4 application version 2.0 been around since 1996.


2. A Web Based application version 9.0 now using flash instead of DHTML been around since 1997.


3. An AIX application version 12 first developed in 1997.


4. A Asp.Net application version 1.07 being built currently.

Item 1 is in the Plateaus of Productivity stage, but it does appear as if the company is developing or even maintaining the product.
Item 2 and 3 are either in slope of enlightenment or the plateaus of productivity stage.
Item 4 is in the technology peak of expectations or somewhere in the troughs of disillusion.

I think this mechanism of evaluation adds value to the choosing of an application.