Ahead of the Hype Cycle

Author : Ingmar Verheij

Gartner analyses the maturity of more than 1,800 technologies trends. Based on the maturity of a technology or trend a decision can be made to adopt or ignore, postpone or adopt the innovation.

In 2010 Gartner published the ‘2010 Special Report’ and consisted of 75 individual Hype Cycle reports, each of which gives a snapshot perspective of a key area of IT or business.

The IT industry acts on trending topics by creating products or solutions and convincing customer to adopt a certain trend or technology. Current trending topics are ‘Bring Your Own’, ‘Consumerization of IT’, ‘Cloud Computing’ and ‘Hosted Virtual Desktop’.

A trending topic (for many years) in The Netherlands is ‘Het nieuwe werken’ (The new working). A trend where flexibility, working from any location and using social media is accepted

Gartner Hype Cycles

These trend are visible in the following Gartner Hype Cycles:

Cloud Computing 2010, High-Performance Workplace 2010, IT Operations Management 2010,Server Technologies 2010 and Virtualization 2010.

Consumerize Your Own Cloud

The trending topic ‘Bring Your Own’ is frequently mixed with ‘Consumerization of IT’, which are two complete different things. Although they can supplement each other, they’re not mutually exclusive. Bringing your own device (iPhone, iPad, Android or Macbook are common things that are brought to the workplace) might led to consumerization (I want to operate the same way as I do at home), it isn’t necessary. Bringing your own device even leds to using some sort of cloud service (for instance online storage).

So in other words, the trending topics are here and Gartner Hype Cycle’s should be monitored to stay ahead of the game.

Ahead of the Hype Cycle

Since I work in the IT industry and frequently talk to customers about trends and how the new technologies can help them embrace change. This lead me to thinking about my own employer, PepperByte. What is our position in these trending topics? Because in the end ‘Practice what you preach’ is a good starting point when giving advice.

Well, we’ve embraced the trending topics before we realized it where trending topics.

Each employee can choose the mobile phone he wants, as long as it receives e-mail (IOS versus Android = 50/50). There are no policies on the phone, neither on the laptops. As long as your activities (and software) are legal, go ahead. So that’s Bring Your Own (BYO)  – or actually Choose Your Own (CYO) as described by Kees Baggerman – and consumerization of IT.

All IT services are provided via a public cloud service provided. So that’s E-Mail, Lync, Sharepoint and accountability. A private cloud is used for lab / demo / training purposes.

Since we have no physical office working from a remote location is key. Whenever I’m not at a customer (which doesn’t happen too often) I’m either working from home (best coffee, btw) or in a meeting room at a location somewhere in the country (depending on the collegae / customer). So we’re embracing ‘Het nieuwe werken’.

Reflection

Okay, so PepperByte is embracing trending topics and has experience in putting them to use. Does that mean we can help all our customers to embrace all trending topics. Well, it depends…

One of the main reasons we succeed in embracing these trending topics is that the business processes are suitable and the people are working in IT. When a company has a more complex business process that requires an application with data, things change. There are many considerations and decisions to make. For instance “who is the owner of the device”,“who is the owner of the data”, “what about legal issue”, “how about compliancy”, “how skilled are my employees (can they Fix Your Own)” and “do I need physical attendance (which rules out working from home)”. And many more.