Gartner's Emerging Technology Hype Cycle 2006

Last month Gartner published their 2006 Hype Cycle special report on Emerging Technologies.  The report surveys 36 key technologies and trends and tries to assess their maturity, impact and speed of adoption.

Gartner sees all things Web 2.0 right now at their peak of the Hype cycle.  Four categories within Web 2.0 with large potential impact are identified as:

  1.  Social Network Analysis (SNA)
  2.  AJAX
  3.  Mashups, and
  4.  Collective Intelligence

	Gartner’s Emerging Technology Hype Cycle for 2006

Two technologies of interest on the diagram are Collective Intelligence and wikis.  Collective Intelligence (CI) refers to applications that can gather and focus the knowledge of groups.  CI is individuals working together with no centralized authority.  Business Collective Intelligence is the kind of group knowledge that Lew Platt, former CEO of HP, was talking about harnessing when he said “If only HP knew what HP knows”.  Gartner sees CI applications as a cost-effective way to produce content, metadata, software and services, and expects mainstream adoption in five to ten years.

Web 2.0 components like blogs, wikis, RSS and AJAX are positioned as CI enabling technologies, transforming the web from being read-only to something much more collaborative.  Leading the CI class of applications are wikis, although  on their hype curve Gartner sees CI and Wikis as two distinct technologies and showing up at quite different locations.  Somewhat surprising is the placment of wikis on the “Trough of Disillusionment” even though wikis are continuing to be positively received and more widely accepted within corporate intranet environments.  Wikis may show up on the trough because they have been slow in receiving acceptance.  InfoWorld first hyped wikis when they declared 2004 the Year of the Enterprise Wiki and the press continues to praise the potential of wikis within the enterprise.   

Wikis have the advantage of being flexible and lightweight when compared to traditional Content Management systems.  Content creation and WYSIWYG editing is fast and easy too.  Wikis encourage collaborative authoring, and they excel at being able to easily create links between content elements. 

But there are many ways where wikis can’t compete with traditional CM.  For example, wikis are weak in creating hierarchical content structure; they evolve organically and hence are typically structured in a totally ad-hoc way.  And when it comes to security, or even the concept of lifecycle information management, wikis come up short when compared to traditional CM systems.

That will change.  Technology evolves and it is likely that wikis will adopt more CM-like functionality while CM systems take on more wiki-like characteristics by gradually adopting Web 2.0 ease-of-use capabilities.