You may be the smartest candidate for the job, but sometimes it’s all about social connections. This holds true in the Bing versus Google battle for search supremacy.  Despite having what may be the smartest computer learning system in the world, the Microsoft-owned search engine lags far behind Google. Why? It’s all about the massive amount of personal information Big Brother Google captures about users.

If CIOs don’t think they have to compete for the business of internal customers, chances are they’ve already lost them. Check out these expert tips on keeping IT competitive and relevant to the business. While you’re at it, read why we think this just might be the new CIO benchmark.

What’s a little privacy when there’s money to be saved on diapers and coffee? In a quest to create competitive advantage supermarket chains put big data analytics into action by offering customers individualized pricing based on their shopping habits.

Instagram: It’s not just for shoe-gazing hipsters anymore. Increasingly, big-name companies like Starbucks, GE and Nike are leveraging the popular photo app to gather customer data.

Finally, in case you missed it, check out this week’s installment of CIO Matters in which news director Linda Tucci makes a case for the CIO’s need to know just how “green” cloud computing really is and why it matters to us all.

Don’t be surprised if HR comes knocking on your door next.

“This same technology that we have introduced from a market perspective now, all of a sudden has found another home with the HR teams,” said Andy Warzecha, vice president of strategy for information management at IBM, and a featured speaker at the recent Fusion 2011 CEO-CIO Symposium in Madison, Wis.

Human resources managers have discovered that “lo and behold, there is a bunch of stuff that employees are saying about the workplace,” Warzecha said.

HR traditionally has taken the temperature of the organization by putting out surveys, Warzecha said. But surveys tend to be “point-in-time instruments” relegated to a small percentage of people and influenced by what’s happening at the moment they’re being taken. Correlating an employee’s communications on both external and internal social media and networking platforms provides a much more holistic view of employee sentiment.

“There is a new way to be able to understand what is happening in our enterprise,” Warzecha said. “We now have a means to be able to understand and become attuned to the employee population inside the organization — and not only by the good stuff that may be going on inside the organization, but also what’s happening in emails, in the documents being written, and in what they are posting or tweeting outside the organization as well.”

IBM, for one, is “drinking its own champagne” by putting its social consumer-insight products in the hands of HR, Warzecha said. Big Brother Blue’s analytics are sucking information from email, from the Lotus Connections platform that hosts wikis and blogs, from Socialtext and Jive software used inside IBM, and from SharePoint or Exchange to help HR take the pulse of IBM employees.

“Job postings seem to be one of the largest things that employees are talking about,” Warzecha informed his Fusion conference audience. Compensation is a hot topic. Now that IBM is shrinking its campus, another biggie is where people are actually going to work.

As displayed on a nifty slide, the IBM products catalog not only what is being said by employees, but also who is doing the posting. “If you are looking for people who are self-promoting, there is a highlight here,” Warzecha said, pointing to one Louis V****, who appeared to be spending an inordinate amount of time talking about topics that might prompt HR to ask if he was really doing his day job.

“The point being is that a lot of this technology that is being developed for outwardly facing marketing has another use … [that] is actually providing very significant value from an HR perspective,” Warzecha said.

Holy Brave New World!

Warzecha put a benign spin on it: “If we can understand disgruntled employees and understand and catch employees before they leave our organization, it is a huge savings to us, as opposed to hiring and training someone else,” he said.

One of the CXOs in the room, to my relief, asked the obvious questions: “Does your workforce know that HR has these analytics? Is there a feeling that Big Brother is watching everything that I do?”

“We’ve talked a little bit about how we are beginning to introduce these tools,” Warzecha said, rightly pointing out that most companies already monitor which Web sites employees go to. “What I think you’re seeing is a move toward more and more of that being established from an HR perspective, and the policies and procedures in employee contracts are going to start to reflect that.”

“Business intelligence 2.0 has been functional since 2003 or 2004,” said Kamlesh Mhashilkar, who heads Tata Consultancy Services’ Business Intelligence practice. Might he offer a short history of this field?

In the mid-1990s, business intelligence technology was in batch mode and segmented by department, according to Mhashilkar. The structured data was delivered for analysis at day’s end or month’s end. By 2000, as companies consolidated information from across their lines of business into one place, the business intelligence horizon expanded to enterprise-wide from departmental silos. By 2003 the push was on to deliver business intelligence, not at day’s end but as soon as possible — in an hour or the next 10 minutes.

“That is where BI 2.0 came into the picture: How can people get the information in near real-time, or right time?” Mhashilkar explained.

As this transformation to immediacy was going on, the amount of business intelligence information exploded to include not just what’s found in tables and data warehouses, but also the less structured text coming from the Internet and wireless devices.

Now comes business intelligence 3.0, which inevitably tries to add correlative data from more extraneous sources, plucking from voices in the marketplace, video streams from surveillance cameras, and the local and not-so-local news shows. All this ancillary information is mixed in with a company’s data stores in the blink of an eye. The sellers will tell you this kind of intelligence makes factories safer, customers happier and commodity traders richer.

The algorithms for making correlations between data have been around for a decade, and much of the hardware for much longer. But in the BI 3.0 world, the surveillance cameras that are standard equipment in retail stores, for example, will serve not only to nab shoplifters but also to recognize confusion on customers’ faces and send help.

“We are doing R&D on this,” Mhashilkar said. And it is not just retail stores where this business intelligence technology could bear fruit. Think of the improved customer service at amusement parks: The business intelligence technology would allow operators to track where a guest is going and trigger alerts for an express pass, perhaps, or an upgrade at the park hotel. “The cameras are already there. The only investment is from the software, which will analyze the images or video captured by the cameras, and just do a synthesis on that to allow much better decisions in real time,” he said.

Or not, because, as every shopper knows, lifting the veil of confusion assumes the salesperson can read your mind, and that sometimes is not the case. Most of the confusion on my face when I’m in a store reflects whether I really want to buy something I can’t afford. And the last thing I want is for some salesperson who’s been sent out by a computer from the backroom to clear that up for me. It’s actually an issue of privacy.

But, as Mhashilkar explained, “To be very frank with you, companies still haven’t crossed level BI 2.0. They are still struggling with the integration of the data. They are still struggling with the correlation of the data in batch mode, and still trying to get near real-time intelligence.”

That’s good — at least for me, because I want the right to remain confused.