Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal wrote up a nice, succinct review of the latest Gartner survey of CIOs regarding IT spend in 2008.

Business intelligence is the biggest priority, but there were some surprises:

Another trend that emerged from the survey: Close to a third of the businesses surveyed plan to increase their investment in so-called Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and customer-generated content. Half of these businesses will be investing in these technologies for the first time.

What struck me the most is that web 2.0 is figuring so prominently in budgets already. Because, honestly, I don’t see a ton of enterprise-class web 2.0 tools out there. For the most part they are all mostly on the consumer side of the web.

But another point about the report and “business intelligence” as a term - what exactly qualifies as a business intelligence tool? Of course, reporting tools and analytics are BI tools. But what about CRM and parts of ERP systems? SugarCRM has deep reporting and analytics, dashboards and charts, etc. that give users deep insight into operations. But I am not sure that Gartner has CRM in mind when it throws the blanket term “business intelligence” around. But I see application sets and BI as inextricably linked. After all, where else is the data coming from that powers BI tools?