Powerpoint gets a lot of bad press, often for good reason (see for example the NY Times article We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint). But the power of a good graphical representation as a focal point for discussion transcends the medium that delivers it — flip chart, Powerpoint or, as in the very first hype cycle, MacDraw!
The hype cycle is a great graphic for tracking and setting expectations around innovations, and in particular for educating execs not to get swept away with each new thing. In the context of technology planning, one of its most important functions is to highlight a set of technologies in relation to each other. This is the best way to avoid the trap of rushing in at the peak because “everybody’s doing it” rather than examining what else you could be spending those same resources on prior to making an adoption decision.
Other graphical representations can play a similar role in comparing investment options. One alternate view that we publish with every hype cycle is the priority matrix (see Figure 1 below). This shows benefit on one axis against “time to plateau”, a simple proxy for risk, on the other. This graphic helps focus a planning discussion around the relative risks and benefits of different technology. Note that the benefit is actually quite varied between industries or even individual companies depending on their value proposition, so a major part of using these graphics is to customize them for your own situation. By forcing your team to take a stab at positioning items on a graphic like this, you make hidden assumptions explicit and drive a more meaningful discussion about investment opportunities and risks.
Other graphics was have published that compare technologies include a radar screen-style chart which features timing, and the newly-introduced market clock (clients can see this at Introducing the Gartner IT Market Clock. Also for clients – the 1800 technologies in the My Hype Cycle,2010 toolkit have several fields such as maturity, adoption level and benefit that could be used to create custom graphics from Excel).
What else have you seen or used that fills a similar function in forcing a comparative look at a set of technology candidates?
Figure 1: The 2010 Priority Matrix for Emerging Technologies - this is a different view of the same technologies featured in the 2010 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle (see blog posting 2010 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle is Here).
