Intelligent Enterprise

If you still haven't gotten the respect you deserve from your CIO, that might change.

Gartner rounded up a whole slew of IT chieftains for a survey not too long ago. Sure, I know Gartner does that all the time, but here's what's interesting about what the CIOs said: Business intelligence now ranks as their top technology priority for 2006.

That's right. Even above security.

Gartner VP Betsy Burton held forth on the findings for Optimize Magazine, and we're bringing you her full interview this week.

Burton talks about a lot, especially the ongoing "democratization" of BI. If you haven't heard that term bandied around before, maybe you know of the concept as "operational" BI. At any rate, it means sharing BI capability with people across the organization -- high and low -- so they can put intelligence into action for whatever job they have at hand. I like one of the ways Burton puts it: She contrasts such widespread BI as "a matter of decision-making versus discovery." That doesn't sum up operational BI by any stretch, but it's one aspect of BI's democratization that I think describes it well.

And last, a question: Are you interested in an under-the-hood look at the engines that make your computers hum? If so, then check out Five Things You Didn't Know About Dual-Core Processors. The most interesting revelation for me personally is that dual cores were not brilliant, proactive innovations of the chip makers. Instead, they were devised to provide a solution to a set of processing problems thrust upon Intel and AMD as single-core chips developed.