Best business intelligence and data articles, 9 - 16 February

Hope springs eternal, especially in Big Data. Despite widespread failure to achieve much of anything with Big Data projects, gargantuan piles of cash keep flowing into such projects, hitting $31 billion in 2013 and expected to top $114 billion by 2018.

There have been already two blog posts (1, 2) about research findings. This is the last one and will introduce answers to questions I6 and I7.Question I6Question I6 wording: Does the initiative of using agile come from the business or from the IT (BI team)?

This guest post is by Simon Musgrave, Managing Director and founder of Musgrave Analytics .Musgrave Analytics is a business analytics consultancy specializing in data analysis, economics and visualization. Simon previously ran Tribal Consulting's Health Intelligence Unit and the Research and Evaluation team. Before Tribal he was a manager in KPMG's business modelling team.

By Saurabh Saxena In the coming years, enormous volumes of machine-generated data from the Internet of Things (IoT) will emerge. If exploited properly, this data - often dubbed machine or sensor data, and often seen as the next evolution in Big Data - can fuel a wide range of data-driven business process improvements across numerous industries.

Their most important tasks are: helping us visualize our data, showing us where we've gone wrong and telling us things we didn't know we wanted to know. Who would have thought they could be this funny? Do you know of any other funny charts? Add them to our list!

Editor's note: Maoz Schact is the CEO of Ginger Software, a mobile keyboard developer. The Information Age has the potential to overwhelm. When that happens on a technical front - when the volume of data is so large that traditional databases cannot handle it, or not handle it well - the industry refers to the phenomenon as "big data."

When Big Data emerged as an important analysis tool a few years back, it was mostly for large enterprises. The complexity of Big Data coupled with its high cost made it out of reach for small businesses then.

Though many companies endorse the potential benefits of Big Data, very few are actually giving this development some serious thought. Particularly, many mid-market companies view this trend with much skepticism and closely seek confirmation from their risk affine industry peers. Among the numerous factors that hamper Big Data adoption in this sector, the most dominant is the Penguin Effect.

There's been a lot of noise lately about "the next big Thing" in the information technology world. Namely, the Internet of Things (IoT). In the fast paced world of IT, it seems like we are on to the next big Thing before the last big Thing has even hit its stride.

Doctors in London have stored 1,600 beating human hearts in digital form on a computer. The aim is to develop new treatments by comparing the detailed information on the hearts and the patients' genes. It is the latest project to make use of advances in storing large amounts of information.

In all the years that I've been covering financial news, one of my biggest pet peeves is the power of tech jargon. Too many investors get too excited about the latest and greatest tech trends when, in reality, they're simply warmed over and rehashed versions of existing trends.