Business Intelligence software ranked top technology priority by CIOs

Ian Bertram, Gartner managing vice president and chair of the 2009 Gartner BI Summit, said that because BI has the highest priority, it will fare better than many other technologies and management practices during the economic downturn. “Businesses will continue to prioritise BI because it’s transformational,” says Bertram. ”BI is even more important when times are tough. It can help find bottlenecks and inefficiencies or to expose areas that are profitable. We continue to see traction for solutions such as spend analytics, risk and fraud. “The rapid growth in information generated from enterprise applications, the popularity of metrics-driven business initiatives and the growing need for regulatory compliance will also continue to drive growth in BI,” he adds. However, he observes that many organisations are still trying to get value from their BI investments, and that further spending will be constrained until they determine how to get that value from the investments they have already made.