We, or rather the electronic devices we employ, are data pack rats, accumulating e-mails, Web pages, credit card swipes, phone messages, stock trades, memos, address books and radiology scans. It's impossible to count all these bits, but people make good guesses, and they have come up with one for 2002. During that year the world created 5 exabytes of information. An exabyte is the digital equivalent of a trillion novels. The yearly total amounts to somewhat more than all the words ever spoken by human beings―and it was up 68% from two years earlier. Such madness creates job security for Nelson Mattos, a computer scientist in charge of IBM's information integration effort. The 44-year-old is one of the world's great data wranglers, paid to help companies make sense of the gigabits they hoard by the day. "Everyone struggles with how to gain value from their investment in information, how much they create and store, where it is, what it looks like and which are the latest versions," says Mattos, who works within IBM's vast Data Management Software Group. "None of the problems gets smaller."
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