“My thinking on productivity has completely changed,” says Mr. Brynjolfsson, who is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

By tracking e-mail traffic, instant messages and other digital communications — stripped of personally identifiable information — he and other researchers are beginning to study the flow of work and ideas through the social networks inside companies — minute by minute, bit by bit.

“We’re really on the cusp of being able to understand what goes on inside corporations in a much more scientific way than ever before,” he said. “It’s similar to the way that the microscope opened up biology in the 17th century, so that you could see blood cells. Now, we can start to see bits of information as they flow through the organism of the corporation.”

The desire to exploit computing and mathematical analytics is by no means new. In the 1960s and ’70s, “operations research” combined computing and math mainly to make factory production work more efficient. And in that period, “decision support” software was intended to help managers more intelligently use information in the big computing file cabinets — databases — that were becoming common in corporations.

But the earlier efforts were limited mainly to information access and reporting systems, says Thomas H. Davenport, a professor at Babson College. The quantity and quality of data were typically inadequate, he notes, and the software could not do the advanced optimization and predictive calculations of today’s programs.

Faster and cheaper computing and ample sources of information in digital form — plucked from enterprise resource planning systems, point-of-sale devices and Web sites — mean that most companies now have the tools to do the kind of competitive analytics that only a relative handful of elite companies could do in the past. “It’s really starting to become mainstream,” says Mr. Davenport, co-author with Jeanne G. Harris of “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” (Harvard Business School Press, 2007). The entry barrier, he says, “is no longer technology, but whether you have executives who understand this.”

There are plenty who do. Big retailers like Wal-Mart Stores and Kohl’s use today’s advanced computing and math to more accurately predict what sizes of clothes should go to what stores. Harrah’s and other casinos decipher slot-machine results to optimize customer traffic and profits, and they use face-recognition software to identify people with criminal records. And Stockholm and other cities use traffic data and patterns to determine “congestion pricing.”