Watching how people put together picture puzzles can reveal "a lot of profound effects that we could bring to " analysis, said Jeff Jonas, IBM's chief scientist for entity analytics, speaking Wednesday at one of the more whimsical presentations at the data structure conference in New York.

Data analysis is becoming a more important component to many businesses. IDC estimates enterprises will spend more than US$120 billion by 2015 on analysis systems. IBM that it will reap $16 billion in business analytics revenue by 2015.

But getting useful results from such systems requires careful planning.

In a series of informal experiments, Jonas observed how small groups of friends and family work together to assemble picture puzzles, those involving thousands of separate pieces that could be assembled to form a picture.

"My girlfriend sees her son and three cousins, I see four parallel processor pipelines," he said. To make the challenge a bit harder, he removed some of the puzzle pieces, and, obtaining a second copy of some puzzles, added duplicate pieces.