The year 2013 moved the world further into the Digital Age — a global epoch of changes whose likely impact on the world economy will be two to three times greater than that of the Industrial Revolution. Some 90 percent of the world's total data were created in the past two years. By 2020, the quantity of stored data could be 50 times greater than it was in 2010. Many pundits regard this massive explosion of data as the new oil, even a new asset class.

This profusion of data is being fueled by the near ubiquity of the Internet. Smart phones are set to connect an additional 2 billion to 3 billion of the world's citizens by 2020, with billions of machine sensors monitoring everything from tractors to jet engines, and further breakthroughs in computing power enabling massive increases in data storage and analysis.

In this environment, fluency in data management and analytics will be vital for successful organizations. A study published in 2011 by MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleagues found that companies using data-driven decision-making had 5 to 6 percent higher productivity rate than those that did not. The ability to capture, organize, extract insights from, and transact with data has now become a core competency for every industry and across every sector.