Books: Peddling Gartner's cycle of hype, more

Mastering the Hype Cycle Jacke Fenn and Mark Raskino (Harvard Business Press)

If you have ever been to a conference where the renowned US technology analyst firm Gartner is presenting you will probably know something about the Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies. It offers a sort of Pilgrim's Progress for IT's new stuff from Technology Trigger to Plateau of Productivity via Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment and Slope of Enlightenment, and it nails what actually happens in the real world.

Too many analysts play safe, repeating predictable stuff or just relaying common sense. The hype cycle is that rare thing: a perfectly apt, readily understandable, visual and spelt-out way to understand a common trend. It is so good that it provokes the tell-tale question: why didn't I think of that?

In a way it is a schematic that fits in with the perception of media behaviour: that journalists build up then knock down anything novel before letting them go on to reach their own level. And certainly the media has played its part in breathlessly pedalling the hype cycle.

The hype cycle is so much a part of the IT world today that it feels like it has been around forever. I was surprised to find that the term was only coined in January 1995 in a Gartner report entitled 'When To Leap on the Hype Cycle'. It was the work of a recent recruit and former Logica consultant Jackie Fenn, and it became a guide for many companies to explain when it is time to plunk down hard cash for new (or new-ish, depending on risk for appetite) technologies. British Airways, for example, used it to act as a bridge between sales and marketing "to moderate overblown expectations and then bolster sagging confidence at different stages of a new technology's hype cycle".

In Mastering the Hype Cycle, Fenn and fellow Gartner co-author Mark Raskino channel field experiences of how the hype cycle has helped firms understand the merits and demerits of grabbing new technology by the throat. They boil down their advice to a six-point outline guide: Scope, Track, Rank, Evaluate, Evangelise, Transfer and this conveniently boils down to the memorable acronym of STREET (isn't it handy when that happens?).

The hype cycle is probably the cleverest framework for understanding new technology's cadence ever developed. This handbook takes the theory from IT suppliers' marketing departments and provides CIOs with practical advice for putting it into action. Read it now before it lapses into the Trough of Disillusionment.

Mastering the Hype Cycle at Amazon

Reengineering The Corporation Michael Hammer and James Champy (Harperbusiness Essentials)

When Reengineering The Corporation was published in 1993, the book was hailed as a business classic, although since then the term 'business process re-engineering' has become associated with downsizing and widely regarded with suspicion as another fancy term for massive cost cutting.

The authors suggested that firms often required processes and culture to be overturned in order to improve performance, save money and create flexibility. In effect, organisational leaders needed to reassess their processes and systems as if they were new companies, booting out the old and replacing it with the new.