Life Cycle

It might seem obvious, but the word "cycle" means going round in a loop. In biology, this means the cycle of birth, reproduction and death. In business, talking about product lifecycles or technology lifecycles carries the expectation that every instance of PRODUCT or TECHNOLOGY has a finite life expectancy, and will be replaced by something else.

But there are two common misuses of the word lifecycle. In the first misuse, people say "cycle" but mean something else. This is illustrated by Gartner's concept of the Hype Cycle, which is not even drawn as a cycle, but as a curved graph going from left to right. See discussion in my Software Industry Analysis blog.

In the second misuse, the concept of cycle is used inappropriately. This is illustrated by a Disaster Lifecycle found on the FEMA website. This appears to show each instance of DISASTER producing new instances of DISASTER.


(via Presentation Zen)

(Of course the ongoing purpose of FEMA assumes a continuous supply of fresh disasters, just as rat-catchers rely upon a continuous supply of rats, but it is really bad PR for FEMA to imply that they are helping to create the disasters they are supposed to be managing.)

The Presentation Zen blog suggests that "Perhaps FEMA would have been better advised to show the stages in a more linear way?" and refers to product adoption lifecycles being presented in left-to-right manner. But the problem (both here and elsewhere) is not just that a given concept has been inappropriately drawn, but that it was the wrong concept in the first place.