Gartner last week held a business intelligence summit in London, at which analysts presented the most common mistakes customers make that constrict them from taking full advantage of BI software. The analyst firm included ways of thinking and approaching BI that can ultimately become the 7 fatal flaws: 1 If we build it, they will come 2 Managers need to negotiate the numbers3 Data quality problem, we don’t have one4 Our enterprise applications vendor will deliver the best solution 5 Darwin was right, BI projects need to evolve6 We can outsource the whole thing7 Just give me a dashboard Gartner surveyed 1300 CIOs and determined that companies plan to increase spending on BI by about 6 percent in 2005. According to the survey, CIOs think that BI, in tandem with improving business processes, will be important in “delivering IT’s contribution to business growth” through 2008. With those stats in mind, the firm also outlined 3 three recommendations for IT shops: 1 Make sure to have senior level business sponsorship for BI 2 Have a unified BI infrastructure3 Leverage existent wisdom and evolve your BI initiatives Software Development