The ultimate goal of any graph, post, or podcast is to make understanding and success accessible.
About 5.8% of people worldwide can solve a Rubik’s Cube. Fewer than 6 in every 100. That figure comes from a YouGov poll conducted in 2014, and even with the explosion of online tutorials since then, current estimates put the real number at somewhere between 8 and 10%.
Which means that of the 350 million Rubik’s Cubes sold worldwide, 90% are sitting on a shelf somewhere. A desk ornament. Twisted twice and abandoned.
I have been in high technology since 1983. When I looked at Gartner’s 2026 Technology Adoption Roadmap for Infrastructure and Operations — a dense, layered, colour-coded radial wheel mapping 44 technologies across four enterprise domains — my first reaction was not awe.
It was the same feeling I get looking at an unsolved Rubik’s Cube.
The Cube Is Not Designed to Be Solved by the Buyer
The Rubik’s Cube is visually compelling. It feels significant in your hands. It signals something about the person who owns it. And it delivers nothing without the methodology to use it.
The Gartner graphic works the same way. The complexity is not the cost of delivering insight. It is the mechanism for selling the next layer of access. Every CIO who sees it has one of two reactions: “I need someone to walk me through this” — which is a Gartner inquiry call — or “I need to show this to my leadership team” — which is a conversation where Gartner is already in the room before anyone else has said a word.
The graphic is not a decision tool. It is a conversation-generation tool dressed as a decision tool. That distinction is the entire Gartner business model.
The Gartner logo in the corner does more credentialing work than the content does.
What the Wheel Actually Shows — and What It Does Not
To be precise: the graphic is commercially well-executed. The three concentric rings represent adoption phases — Already Deployed, In Deployment, Early Planning. The dots carry two attributes: enterprise value and deployment risk. Four quadrants organize the domains: Cloud and Edge Data Centre, Digital Workplace, Network, and Operations.
A CIO can use it as a conversation starter. To the CFO, the inner ring is capital already committed and the middle ring is where active budget decisions are being made right now — and anything high-risk in that middle ring without a readiness assessment behind it is a liability, not an investment. To the CPO, the Operations quadrant is where procurement-adjacent technology is moving and where vendors will be making pitches in the next 18 months. To the CDO, LLM observability, AI-powered agent advisory, and agentic netOps are all in that wheel — and every one of them is a data governance problem before it is a technology problem.
What the wheel cannot tell any of them is whether their organization is structurally ready to execute on any of it. That is not an oversight. Answering that question honestly would kill deals that Gartner’s commercial model depends on.
The odds of randomly twisting your way to the solution are essentially zero. You need the algorithm.
The Algorithm Gartner Does Not Provide
The algorithm — the one Gartner charges separately for, and still does not fully provide — is the organizational readiness diagnostic that tells you whether you can actually execute on any of the 44 dots on that wheel.
Phase 0™ is the algorithm.
It asks the questions the wheel was designed not to raise:
- Where, in our current operating model, does this technology actually have a runway?
- What happens when real-world conditions hit it?
- Who owns the decision when the model and reality disagree?
- What is the state of our process structural integrity and resulting governance architecture before we commit capital?
The Procurement Insights archive has spent 18 years — 3,300+ documents, zero vendor sponsorships — documenting what happens when organizations skip that step. The label changes. ERP. E-procurement. Cloud. Digital transformation. AI. The failure rate does not. It sits stubbornly at 75–85%, exactly where it sat when I started asking these questions in 1983.
The Only Editorial Standard That Has Ever Mattered
The ultimate goal of any graph, post, or podcast is to make understanding and success accessible.
That is the editorial policy of this archive. It is also the precise indictment of the Gartner graphic and every complexity-as-authority business model in enterprise technology.
Gartner optimizes for impressiveness. Procurement Insights optimizes for accessibility. Those are not the same direction. They are opposite directions dressed in the same vocabulary.
If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough. After 42 years in this industry, I understand the problem. The wheel tells you where to point the telescope. Phase 0™ tells you whether the ship you are on can survive the journey.
90% of Rubik’s Cubes were never solved. The cube was not the problem. The absence of the methodology was.
The question has not changed since 1983. The platforms have. The failure rate has not.
Jon Hansen is the Founder of Hansen Models™ and has published Procurement Insights since 2007 — an 18-year (and counting), 3,300+ document living archive with zero vendor sponsorships. Phase 0™ assessments and enterprise inquiries: hpt@hansenprocurement.com
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Procurement Insights 
The Gartner Roadmap Is a Rubik’s Cube. 90% of the People Who Buy It Never Solve It.
Posted on March 30, 2026
0
The ultimate goal of any graph, post, or podcast is to make understanding and success accessible.
About 5.8% of people worldwide can solve a Rubik’s Cube. Fewer than 6 in every 100. That figure comes from a YouGov poll conducted in 2014, and even with the explosion of online tutorials since then, current estimates put the real number at somewhere between 8 and 10%.
Which means that of the 350 million Rubik’s Cubes sold worldwide, 90% are sitting on a shelf somewhere. A desk ornament. Twisted twice and abandoned.
I have been in high technology since 1983. When I looked at Gartner’s 2026 Technology Adoption Roadmap for Infrastructure and Operations — a dense, layered, colour-coded radial wheel mapping 44 technologies across four enterprise domains — my first reaction was not awe.
It was the same feeling I get looking at an unsolved Rubik’s Cube.
The Cube Is Not Designed to Be Solved by the Buyer
The Rubik’s Cube is visually compelling. It feels significant in your hands. It signals something about the person who owns it. And it delivers nothing without the methodology to use it.
The Gartner graphic works the same way. The complexity is not the cost of delivering insight. It is the mechanism for selling the next layer of access. Every CIO who sees it has one of two reactions: “I need someone to walk me through this” — which is a Gartner inquiry call — or “I need to show this to my leadership team” — which is a conversation where Gartner is already in the room before anyone else has said a word.
The graphic is not a decision tool. It is a conversation-generation tool dressed as a decision tool. That distinction is the entire Gartner business model.
The Gartner logo in the corner does more credentialing work than the content does.
What the Wheel Actually Shows — and What It Does Not
To be precise: the graphic is commercially well-executed. The three concentric rings represent adoption phases — Already Deployed, In Deployment, Early Planning. The dots carry two attributes: enterprise value and deployment risk. Four quadrants organize the domains: Cloud and Edge Data Centre, Digital Workplace, Network, and Operations.
A CIO can use it as a conversation starter. To the CFO, the inner ring is capital already committed and the middle ring is where active budget decisions are being made right now — and anything high-risk in that middle ring without a readiness assessment behind it is a liability, not an investment. To the CPO, the Operations quadrant is where procurement-adjacent technology is moving and where vendors will be making pitches in the next 18 months. To the CDO, LLM observability, AI-powered agent advisory, and agentic netOps are all in that wheel — and every one of them is a data governance problem before it is a technology problem.
What the wheel cannot tell any of them is whether their organization is structurally ready to execute on any of it. That is not an oversight. Answering that question honestly would kill deals that Gartner’s commercial model depends on.
The odds of randomly twisting your way to the solution are essentially zero. You need the algorithm.
The Algorithm Gartner Does Not Provide
The algorithm — the one Gartner charges separately for, and still does not fully provide — is the organizational readiness diagnostic that tells you whether you can actually execute on any of the 44 dots on that wheel.
Phase 0™ is the algorithm.
It asks the questions the wheel was designed not to raise:
The Procurement Insights archive has spent 18 years — 3,300+ documents, zero vendor sponsorships — documenting what happens when organizations skip that step. The label changes. ERP. E-procurement. Cloud. Digital transformation. AI. The failure rate does not. It sits stubbornly at 75–85%, exactly where it sat when I started asking these questions in 1983.
The Only Editorial Standard That Has Ever Mattered
The ultimate goal of any graph, post, or podcast is to make understanding and success accessible.
That is the editorial policy of this archive. It is also the precise indictment of the Gartner graphic and every complexity-as-authority business model in enterprise technology.
Gartner optimizes for impressiveness. Procurement Insights optimizes for accessibility. Those are not the same direction. They are opposite directions dressed in the same vocabulary.
If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough. After 42 years in this industry, I understand the problem. The wheel tells you where to point the telescope. Phase 0™ tells you whether the ship you are on can survive the journey.
90% of Rubik’s Cubes were never solved. The cube was not the problem. The absence of the methodology was.
The question has not changed since 1983. The platforms have. The failure rate has not.
Jon Hansen is the Founder of Hansen Models™ and has published Procurement Insights since 2007 — an 18-year (and counting), 3,300+ document living archive with zero vendor sponsorships. Phase 0™ assessments and enterprise inquiries: hpt@hansenprocurement.com
-30-
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