How do you make the enterprise more intelligent?

That question was posed to Josh James, Domo founder and CEO, and Godfrey Sullivan, CEO of Splunk, at the Dow Jones VentureWire FASTech Conference in Redwood City, California.

The question is not a new one, so why does there seem to be extra attention being paid to the topic these days?  Two obvious reasons: Big Data and Cloud Computing. But at Domo, we’d argue there’s a third, more-forceful driver: Money. (aka Benjamins, bread, bones, cashola, cheese, coin, dinero, dough, etc. )

Whatever you call it, it boils down to getting business value from the avalanche of data that you’ve got.

Never before have businesses had more data, created from more sources, living in more places. And never before has so much money been spent on harnessing it.  Gartner Research and Forrester Research both estimate that today’s business intelligence market is $10B.

So back to the question, how do you make the enterprise more intelligent?

Josh’s response was to get data out of IT and into the hands of the business user. Free it from just being in the hands of the technical folks and serve it up to the 98% of the organization that doesn’t carry tech credentials. Once you start spreading information throughout the organization, THAT becomes very empowering to the business. That’s a more intelligent enterprise.

What do you think?