Data — or Big Data, as quantitative analysts will call it — is the tool du jour for tech-savvy companies that have realized that lurking in the vast pools of unprocessed information in their networks are solutions to some of today’s most pressing and convoluted problems. A few years ago, Google, for example, took the 50 million most common keywords that Americans typed in search bars and tried to figure out, by comparing them with federal health statistics, where the H1N1 flu virus was to likely strike next.

According to a new book, “Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think,” the enormous quantity of information whirling through the ether can affect and enhance our quality of life. As the authors put it, “The change of scale has led to a change of state.”

Now the city has brought this quantitative method to the exceedingly complicated machine that is New York. For the modest sum of $1 million, and at a moment when decreasing budgets have required increased efficiency, the in-house geek squad has over the last three years leveraged the power of computers to double the city’s hit rate in finding stores selling bootleg cigarettes; sped the removal of trees destroyed by Hurricane Sandy; and helped steer overburdened housing inspectors — working with more than 20,000 options — directly to lawbreaking buildings where catastrophic fires were likeliest to occur.

“I think of us as the Get Stuff Done Folks,” Michael Flowers who oversees the group, said. “All we do is take and process massive amounts of information and use it to do things more effectively.”

Before being hired in 2009 by John Feinblatt, the mayor’s chief policy adviser, Mr. Flowers didn’t know much about computer code — let alone Bayesian statistics. From 1999 to 2003, he worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, prosecuting homicides and drug crimes. When he left law enforcement, he moved to Washington, where he joined the power law firm Williams & Connolly and later took a job with the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Disenchanted by the smug homogeneity of Washington, Mr. Flowers leapt at the chance in 2005 to travel to Iraq with a team from the Justice Department to work on issues concerning mass graves and on Saddam Hussein’s trial.