Digital information is being created at a rate of 15 petabytes per day. Putting it in perspective, that amount of data would be equivalent to eight times the data housed in all the libraries in the United States combined.

Another innovative effort out of IBM Research may be a harbinger of a new paradigm emerging in analytics - one that can help a business not only make sense of the voluminous amount of data emanating from their operations, but also use it to drive upward the value of their organization.

Did you happen to catch Watson beat out the greatest Jeopardy! champions of all time in Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter? Developed over the past four years by a team of scientists who set out to accomplish a great challenge - build a computing system that rivals a human's ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence - Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, successfully tested this new type of analytics capability on Jeopardy!

Watson represents a major breakthrough in computers understanding natural language - real language not specifically designed and encoded.

To better understand how today's organizations are using analytics, prioritizing future investments and transforming insights into action, a survey was conducted amongst a global sample of nearly 3,000 executive managers and analysts, and based on the results, this study offers recommendations on how organizations can strengthen their analytics capabilities to achieve a long-term advantage.