One of the biggest hurdles in building or rebuilding or just enhancing the database platform and systems is getting buy-in from the bean counters and the business strategists who want as much return-on-investment as possible with technology today.

It's not a matter of IT leaders having the expertise and knowledge and credibility with the CIO or CFO for getting budget dollars needed for the hardware, software and services that all go into making a system.

You have to drive home how important data is to the business, the untapped potential of data being collected and not used, the ability to ferret out valuable data that isn't even known but on which money is already being spent to manage and store and protect.

Decision-making onIT dollars is harder than ever, as enterprises want to push forward on everything from better CRM, for keepign and luring new business, to deeper social network technologies for both brand and marketing reasons. Data, in each and every case, plays a major role. It's the linchpin at this point for everything business.

That's why reading IBM's Global CIO Study 2009 is so important as it can be a huge weapon in the database budget justification effort. Check out IBM's YouTube study video as well.

In the meantime I wanted to provide just a tease of what you'll read.

The study reports that leveraging analytics to gain competitive advantage and bolster business decision making is a top priority for CIOs. Eighty-three percent of the 2,500 respondents identified business intelligence and analytics, and the use of technology to collect, analyze and make decisions as the way to enhance an organization's competitiveness.

Consider this tiny tidbit:

High-growth CIOs proactively craft data into actionable information 61 percent more often than low-growth CIOs. "Our prosperity depends completely on our data," said an electronics CIO in Switzerland.

Add it together with this:

In the next five years, 87 percent of high-growth CIOs expect to seek customers active input and interaction, compared to 70 percent of low-growth CIOs. "The closer we get to production and the customer, the more value we add for them," said a technology industry CIO.

Business success is simply tied to using today's data, and the heaps of future data, in the best way possible, where it's to adjust product portfolios, improve customer service, save costs in operations and internal business processes and determine future product roadmaps based on customers' needs, wants and requirements.

The IBM study the largest to date where CIOs were polled in person on what's happening in their IT organization, how they're planning to move the business forward and what they see as challenges down the road.

Those challenges, for example, include data reliability and security given increased focus on analytics and the growth of data itself. No surprise that 71 percent are planning to boost risk management and compliance efforts.