Ben Worthen in his Wall Street Journal “Business Technology” blog “The Death of Gut Instinct” discusses how:

“For the third year in a row, CIOs (surveyed by Gartner) said that
‘business intelligence software,’ which organizes and analyzes the data
companies collect, was their top tech priority.”

Ben further comments:

“…information-technology departments have used those (previous BI)
projects – which usually involved building a giant data repository and
installing software that can look for trends in that data – as stepping
stones to greater glory.”

I am very excited by the continuing growth of business intelligence
and performance management efforts across enterprises of all sizes and
all industries. There is real business value to these projects.
Business people realize it, not just IT folks.

There is something, however, that concerns me because it is either
being left unsaid or, worse, being taken for granted. Business people,
and in many cases industry analysts and pundits, associate an IT
project with the customer facing software. An IT project is then
considered a Business Objects, Cognos or Hyperion project rather than,
say, a financial data warehouse project.

>>> Read the rest of "It’s the data (integration) that enables BI" on the Informatica Enterprise Data Management blog.