Gartner would do well to appoint a proper historian, and perhaps a proper ethicist, in recognition of some of the truths about itself that never appear in a PowerPoint deck. Here's a prediction for you: Hype Cycles will be really interesting as historic documents, not about the actual state and adoption of technology but as a marker of the stories told about it, the rise and fall of belief somewhat decoupled from reality. When you find out what Activity Streams are, perhaps we can have a go at getting them into the 2022 edition. Which is duly noted, and fed back into the next time, all the while carrying the name of Gartner through the media with a strong whiff of broad, deep tech mastery. What do Hype Cycles tell us about Gartner and its true nature? The clue's in the name Gartner absorbs the reportage and opinion about how well corporate portals are doing this year, slaps them in or not, and the result gets reported in the press with more or less reaction. Like science fiction, they're not much good at actual prediction – which real science fiction rarely pretends to. Hype Cycles are science fiction, in the way they reflect the biases and hopes and uncertainties of the present much as stories about the future always do. All aboard the Hype Cycle! What's DataOps? Well, it has no standards or frameworks.Gartner's Great Vanishing: Some of 2017's emerging techs just disappeared.Gartner's hype cycle turned upside down to assess Brexit.Forget Big Data hype, says Gartner as it cans its hype cycle.Hype Circle 2015: Gartner stares groggily into crystal ball.Whatever happened to that Google thing, anyway? Oh, if search engines or ARM chips or OLEDs are in there anywhere, I missed them. There are patterns: earlier Hype Cycles love "Activity Streams", whatever they were, and quantum computing seems to crop up about one year in two. 2002 is bizarrely on the money, with "personal digital assistant phones", VPNs, location sensing and the like outnumbering the nanotech and the fuel cells. Bless.Īs you scan up and down, you realise it's mostly a lottery.
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But then we have 802.11ax, which is a good call but as insightful as saying Apple will sell some phones, and, oh yes, quantum computing. It looked bonkers five years ago, it looks doubly so now. It thinks Virtual Reality is the bee's knees, but frankly any diagram that starts off with Smart Dust, 4G printing (what?), and General Purpose Machine Intelligence is an Iain M Banks outline rather than cogent analysis.
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So let's nip over to 2016, a mere five years ago. But that's an unfair comparison as most of the latter references are to "data ethics" the other sort, the ones at the core of your company, score just 460 – that's a 438:1 ratio, the square root of strategy. The words "strategy" and "strategic" occur nearly 200,000 times on its website "ethics" just 3,600. Perhaps we can use some analytics of our own to judge the priorities it offers. Which, of course, we do.īut what if sceptical types want to check? Gartner has branched out from its initial IT focus to providing research and advice to all aspects of business – customer care, legal, HR, you name it.
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It has considerable influence on the market with its Magic Quadrants of who's in and who's out, and as these people tend to be those clients again, we have to take it on trust that no undue influence comes attached to large cheques. It gets its raw material from confidential conversations with its paying clients, mixes that data up in its giant cauldron of proprietary analytics, and then sells it back to them and their peers. The company has an admirably sustainable business model that comes close to the fabled circular supply chain. It acts as soothsayer to the troubled monarchs of industry and whichever of their courtiers can afford a subscription to its reports. A very big odd fish, making some $4bn a year out of its 16,000 souls beavering away in its shiny belly.