Following on from my previous blog ‘Does Sharing Information Decrease Performance’ it is interesting to see Gartner also supports decision making as being the hot BI project for 2008. Proposing that gut instinct is being replaced by “access to data that’s good enough to take quick action on”, Mark McDonald, a vice president at Gartner, comments on a recent survey of 1,500 CIOs about their companies’ technology agendas. For the third year running – BI Is number 1.

The difference however, is that the focus is no longer on the data warehouse with analytics, but rather tools that make decisions based on trends highlighted by analytics.

Another trend that emerged from the survey is the increase in investment in so-called Web 2.0 technologies – blogs and wikis. To date, only 50% of CIO’s have rolled out these capabilities. However, as Web 2.0 transitions from hype to ‘must have’, businesses are recognising that use of these tools to capture customer input into products.

Both BI and Web 2.0 technologies create opportunities to be more creative in the use of data, adding to its value as a corporate asset.