Why Data Boom May Be The 'Big Innovation Of Our Age'

Data--your emails, the lovely lady giving you directions in your smart phone, the latest political polls-- It may be overwhelming, but it is revolutionizing all aspects of our world.

Take baseball: Computer-generated analysis is allowing coaches to project how well players will perform, as we learned in the movie "Moneyball."

In health, researchers troll the web looking for spikes in Google searches on flu, because they know that means in a couple of weeks patients will be heading for the emergency room.

And new research in data crunching may help people understand how to job search. And the jobs are definitely in data crunching.

The McKinsey Global Institute says the U.S. will need up to 200,000 analysts and a million and a half data-literate managers just to understand all the data swirling around us in what the New York Times calls the "age of big data."