Gartner Hypes its 2006 Hype Cycle

Earlier this week, Gartner released its 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle. The good folks at Tekrati recap it here. The report highlights these themes:

• Web 2.0 technologies
• Location-aware technologies
• Applications architectures

The 2006 Hype Cycle also acknowledges the growing consumerisation of IT. The ease of use inherent in technologies such as iPods and blogging is bound to set an expectation by users of corporate IT that the systems/dashboards/tutorials they use should be just as intuitive.

The recap is worth a full read, but here are a few highlights:

Under Web 2.0 technologies, the report rates Social Network Analysis (SNA) as "high impact" (meaning it will generate significant revenue/cost savings.) "SNA is the use of information and knowledge from many people and their personal networks. It involves collecting massive amounts of data from multiple sources, analyzing the data to identify relationships and mining it for new information."

Ajax is also rated as high impact (no surprises there) for its ability to make tough-to-manage Web apps easier to use.

Collective intelligence is rated as "transformational," meaning it will enable new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics. "Collective intelligence is an approach to producing intellectual content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority."

It seems that we've been hearing forever that location-aware applications are just around the corner. Gartner predicts mainstream adoption in the next two to five years. Look for applications in field force management, fleet management, logistics and goods transportation. Europe is slightly ahead of the United States with this technology, Gartner reports.