InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Companies know that advanced analytics can give them a competitive ­advantage, but how do they get there? With 44% of staffers in our salary ­survey saying one of their top duties is "designing and revising reports" and just 12% of managers and 10% of staff focusing on tasks that can help ­predict performance, it appears there's still a long road ahead.

Companies want more than they're getting from their big data analysis. Big and small vendors are working on some key big data problems.

As CMOs increase their tech spending, it's up to IT to get wise to marketing's ways.

Advanced analytics' predictive capabilities combined with big data are driving a new age of experimentation.

Companies of all sizes are embracing data visualization, self-­service BI and big data analysis, our survey finds. Advanced ­analytics is ­of particular interest to our respondents: 62% say they’re using these technologies to optimize business operations, while 44% aim to identify business risk and another 44% hope to ­predict promising new business opportunities. This ­report ­explores use cases in higher education and insurance, and shows how emerging analytics techniques are achieving breakthrough results.

Sears pushes the cutting edge with some big data techniques, while trying to sell its big data services. Can emerging tech drive change in old-school companies?

It's a good time to be a big data and analytics expert: demand is high and supply is low. Eighteen percent of big data-focused companies in our survey want to increase staff in this area by more than 30% in the next two years, but 53% expect it will be hard to find people with the required skills. Find out how companies in diverse industries are coping with the shortage.

E. & J. Gallo, the No. 5 company in the InformationWeek 500, brings silos of data together for analysis and adds insights from social networks.

When does it pay to fine-tune enterprise applications?

Visualization helps spot trends in big data.