That's understandable, and it's the topic of our lead story in February, High-Stakes Analytics. But there's a larger facet to BI that Gartner vice president Betsy Burton believes CIOs should consider: its fundamental definition, and its breadth and depth within your company. Simply put, in this Q&A, she maintains that CIOs should rethink not only what data constitutes business intelligence but also who in the company should be able to use it.

Q: If I understand your report correctly, you're making a clear distinction between how people think about BI today and how they should think about it in the future.

A: We're trying to get people to acknowledge that the business intelligence market—and what people are looking for from BI—has evolved dramatically over the last couple of years. People think of classic reporting, query, and OLAP tools. But we're talking about using business intelligence to help people lead, measure, optimize, discover, and innovate in order to change the landscape of their organization. We're beginning to see people have a much broader definition of where they see the value of BI.

Q: How would you characterize the way it's been used?

A: I think that BI traditionally had an elitist role within the organization. It was information available to a specific group of people in the form of dashboards and reports. What we're advocating is making BI available to a broader group of people and empowering them to make decisions that are more quantitatively based during their work.

Q: Kind of the democratization of BI?

A: That's one way of putting it. It's using BI to optimize how I'm doing business and help me discover new ways of doing business. It's a question of decision-making versus discovery. I think of decision-making as a hard and rigid process. Leading and measuring are part of a cycle of evolution in BI. BI should become an inherent part of how people work across the organization. It's the use of information for everything you're working on, not just one part of a decision.

Q: Can you give me an example of how this might work?

A: I spoke to the CIO of a large retail organization, who told me that his dream is to be able to drive up to one of his locations with a GPS device and download information about the store's inventory and what's selling best, so that he can walk inside and start working more efficiently. That's not a decision per se—it's having information available that clearly shows him a direction.

Here's another example: There's an agency in a state where the governor's focus is on education, so it has created a visualization program for the governor that sits on top of the information and shows him what's happening in each district. It's the same kind of data that's in a report—but without the visualization, he can't analyze what's going on.

Q: Are we talking about the same kind of evolution that CRM is going through, the way it started with sales force automation and contact management, then morphed into CRM, and is now becoming a subset of ERP?

A: You can characterize it that way. Another way of looking at it is that people are doing BI in lots of different ways, not just with BI tools. They're doing it in spreadsheets, and BI capabilities are appearing in other applications as analytics. That's why I say that CIOs should expand their idea of what BI is. Your security tools report on attempted break-ins; that's reporting. System management tools report on system availability. That's business intelligence. Now, you're never going to be able to use the same tool for all of this, but it's important to understand where you're doing reporting and where it's important to you.

Q: That's right, because if your system availability figures begin to affect the availability of your e-commerce site, that's eventually going to affect customer satisfaction.

A: Yes, and because that's crucial to your business, you'd better include it in what you categorize as business intelligence. We're not 100% there yet at all, but we're starting to move in that direction. The role of BI is changing and evolving on a continuum.

Q: Why is it important for the CIO to be the leader on this?

A: There are several reasons. For one thing, you have financial and marketing people who want or need these analytics, and they're coming to IT for help. Certainly, compliance is also an issue—being able to track what you have and what you know. And there's also the issue we mentioned before, the democratization or consumerization of IT. More and more, you have workers out there who are used to getting the information they need in order to get their job done, and they're getting it one way or another. They're building the spreadsheet or whatever it takes to get it. So you need to deliver the technology to them, and you can't do it in a cookie-cutter fashion. You have to understand what's important to them and deliver it.

Feedback question: Tell us what your biggest BI challenge would be in an era of BI democratization.

Burton will also be speaking at Gartner's upcoming conference on business intelligence, scheduled for March 6-8 in Chicago.

Q&A conducted by contributing Web editor Howard Baldwin.