The top technology priority for CIOs in 2012 is still analytics and business intelligence, according to analyst firm Gartner. Organisations spent over $12 billion in 2012 on analytics, business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) software.

Dan Sommer, principal analyst at Gartner said: “IT [departments] continue to spend and earmark money to BI, despite constrained budgetary environments. Gartner's 2012 CIO survey showed that analytics and BI is the number one technology priority for CIOs in 2012. BI projects remain relatively shielded, while a healthy portion of any discretionary money will be available for upcoming analytic initiatives.”

Sommer also said users outside of traditional IT, are using BI tools for line-of-business initiatives, and spending increasingly more: “Key drivers for this are self-service data discovery tools, the race among suppliers to provide business context through packaged analytics, and CFOs taking a renewed interest in BI and PM."