A recent poll of more than 1 000 CIOs conducted by Gartner reveals that in 2004 two-thirds of CIOs felt their jobs might be at risk because they didn't deliver expected value on IT investments.

This problem stems from a trend over the past 20 years to purchase various technology systems separately.

The fallout from buying best-of-breed solutions, however, has been that IT departments must now spend tremendous amounts of time, money and energy trying to integrate disparate legacy solutions - a process that does nothing to deliver business intelligence across the enterprise. On the contrary, as IT departments struggle to meet new business demands in such an ad hoc fashion, they become trapped by technical limitations and are less and less able to respond effectively. Yet, surprisingly, businesses continue to invest in these "standalone" solutions.

Cost containment and revenue growth are top business priorities today, as is the ability to be more responsive and to change and adapt as necessary. Using standalone systems to meet these priorities, however, is like driving in the dark without headlights - you can't see ahead and therefore cannot move forward.

Clearly, CIOs must find a way to achieve better visibility into the enterprise - from operational execution (for instance, product and channel knowledge) to overall performance (market position and customer satisfaction).

A proactive CIO should promote effective knowledge processes and systems that are able to collect data from any source and deliver dynamic and accurate information to the right person at the right time in any format. The challenge for many CIOs, then, is to lead their company's efforts to get real business benefits from IT investments. To meet current business requirements with more agility, the CIO of today needs to give up the antiquated, isolated approaches of the past or risk being left behind by competitors.

To deliver a 360-degree view of the business, CIOs should move to more systemic approaches that can collect all business intelligence processes on a single platform - one that uses the same data for analysis and reporting.

As noted in "IDC: Business Intelligence Trends" by Christina Steensboe, "Full-featured cross-platform Business Intelligence (BI) software will increasingly be required to manage the complexities of modern analytic and information delivery environments." Investment in integrated intelligence platforms is critical so that data can be used to respond to industry obligations and regulations faster and more efficiently, and ensure consistent, high-quality business performance management.

As a SAS sales executive, my personal challenge, and my responsibility, is to help our customers find, implement and optimise the appropriate scalable and adaptable platform. This platform should present a single version of the truth, delivering information in the right context through interfaces that are adjusted to individual needs.

The SAS 9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform takes advantage of SAS's integrated architecture to run seamlessly across operating systems and access multiple data sources in a single query - allowing our customers to react quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they arise.