ITIL, ITSM and Agile Modeling at Google Trends

Tue, 30 May 2006 14:45:00 GMT

So if data modeling has been around for decades, I thought I'd check Google Trends to see how some of the newer terms would show. First, I started with ITIL. Google Trends allows you to report on trends only as far back as Jan 2004, so ITIL shows a fairly slow rise in search popularity.

Next I tried IT Service Management (ITSM), a related term. The trend shows that ITSM was not popular enough to be tracked by Google Trends until about February 2004. By watching those trend lines, you can pretty much tell when a term got buzz.

So in the above sample, you can see the birth of a buzzword. My guess is that as long as the lines remain steady or increasing, the term may progress from buzzword to silver bullet to standard of practice. Maybe.

Sometimes terms are popular in a small enough user base, or have small popularity in a larger user base that there is insufficient data for reporting. For example, if you type in agile modelings, you will get a page that looks like the sample figure below.

This just means that the term has not had enough searches to reach the popularity requirement for reporting in Google Trends. I'm curious, though, as to when terms "make it".

I'll write more later about trends and looking to the past.

Karen Lopez: Musings on Data, Process, and Architecture

ITIL, ITSM and Agile Modeling at Google Trends