Your company is doomed to fail if 'the biggest jerk at the table' makes all the decisions in spite of comprehensive data analysis. EMC and its customers are taking analytics seriously, CIO.com columnist Rob Enderle says. You should, too. It's a lesson Mitt Romney learned the hard way.

Walt Hauck, the straight-talking CIO of Dun & Bradstreet, says big data represents a corporate turning point this decade no less disruptive and revolutionary than the Internet in the 1990s. Find out why Hauck thinks the big data 'haves' will thrive while the 'have-nots' struggle.

Big data is giving rise to a new breed of services aimed at helping over-burdened IT departments take on the challenges of data analytics without investing in additional infrastructure. And vendors of all sizes are getting in on the action.

You name it, the government has a pile of data about it: genomics, energy use, the weather and more. Various open data and big data initiatives at the federal government aim to make this information available to anyone who wants it. Can the inherent complexity of big data analytics and the promise of open government coexist?

As we end a transformational year in enterprise tech, you may wonder: What next? I think these 10 trends will reshape business and the CIO role:

Most analytics tools put data in an historical context. That's all well and good, but if what if you want to use past data to gauge future performance? That narrows your analytics options. These six tools will help you make practical use of your data in order to make business decisions.

In-memory analytics, like virtualization and the cloud, is an old idea that's been given new life. In this case, the combination of big data, inexpensive commodity storage and parallel processing make it possible to analyze terabytes of data without slowing systems to a crawl.

Trees probably aren't the first thing you think of when someone mentions New York City, but the city has a lot of them. Pruning and maintaining them is a public safety issue, and determining how to prioritize that maintenance is no easy feat. With the help of a nonprofit organization called DataKind, the city's Parks department is leveraging big data analytics for the job.

Hadoop is nearly synonymous with the analysis of big data. The Hortonworks Data Platform on Windows is significant as it means that companies lacking Linux expertise will finally be able to benefit from the big data analysis platform, which has been out of the reach of Windows shops.

To make more efficient use of data and improve data protection, take a holistic approach to information governance-one that focuses attention on the most sensitive data while removing impediments to sharing.

Technology trends can come and go with little more than a (Google) Wave, but seven trends of 2012 are here to stay. Some came out of nowhere, while others emerged after years of development.