The nation's major freight railroads plan to invest an estimated $24.5bn in 2013 to build, maintain and upgrade America's rail network to ensure freight railroads can continue to deliver for the nation's economy, according to the Association of American Rialroads. This investment includes $13bn in projected capital expenditures, which go toward upgrading or enhancing rail network capacity in the year ahead.

A few years ago, DHL Express was in a downward spiral of data quality. The company had used a Microsoft costing tool deployed locally in the 200 countries in it operates. Graeme Aitkin, vice president of business controlling, said the tool used employee interviews to localize cost allocations, asking couriers how they spent their time every day. In the old days, he said, when the data wasn't available, it wasn't possible for a company to have a unified costing and pricing system across a global company.

It's fairly common practice today for major brands to have a social media team at the ready to respond to customer complaints on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. The practice is so widespread that a recent Call Center Satisfaction Index (CCSI) report released by CFI Group found that call centers should perhaps be renamed "contact centers."

Do you have powerful IT systems monitoring every movement in your supply chain? Collecting thousands of pieces of data from origin to destination? Building up a comprehensive data bank over months and years of business intelligence? So what do you do with that data?