Business intelligence will be the top spending priority for IT executives in 2007, continuing an increase in the emphasis enterprises place on gathering and analyzing data about company operations, a survey released this week shows.

Business intelligence was the third biggest priority in 2006, and the fifth biggest in 2005, according to annual surveys by research firm Saugatuck Technology and BusinessWeek Research Services.

Businesses have lots of information about customers in separate data sources, and want to combine that data into a “single view” of their customers, says Judith Hurwitz of the research and consulting firm Hurwitz & Associates.

Data spread across several departments are “isolated from each other. In order to do business appropriately, you have to look at all aspects of that in a unified way,” Hurwitz says. “That’s the issue that’s keeping a lot of organizations focused on business intelligence and their data.”

Investments in business intelligence, such as improving data standardization, reporting, communication and decision making, help make companies more agile “as they move toward real-time, on-demand business and IT environments,” Saugatuck notes.

Saugatuck’s worldwide survey polled 230 IT executives at companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue. After business intelligence, the top spending priorities, in order, were ERP software upgrades, data warehousing, new custom applications, portal and collaboration software, security software and services, network upgrades, application integration, database software and upgrades, and business process management.

The list shows that IT executives “plan to focus their 2007 investment strategies on leveraging existing data and information assets to provide better business insight and management,” states a research alert written by Bruce Guptill, a managing director of Saugatuck.