PRO+ Premium Content/CIO Decisions

How much do big data and analytics matter? Companies will gain or lose market share based on their capacity to leverage big data, according to Michael Chui, San Francisco-based senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of New York-based McKinsey & Co. Inc. And as has long been observed, "Whoever has will be given more." "We are going to see companies that start on this learning curve sooner accelerate their gains," said Chui, an author of last year's massive McKinsey report on the value of big data. Collecting and analyzing large data sets already is driving changes in health care, a field that the McKinsey study projected could reap as much $300 billion in value from the effective use of big data, including $200 billion in reduced spending. Hospitals are aware of -- if not exactly on top of -- the impact big data and analytics can have in improving human health, said James Noga, CIO at Partners HealthCare System, a Boston-based health care nonprofit. "We know at Partners, even with our small data set, we ...