We all know technology and data analysis is making change happen everywhere in the enterprise. It's making companies smarter, more cost efficient and more competitive.

But rarely do we get insight on how technology is helping save lives and changing how people work.

That's why I love IBM's YouTube efforts as they illustrate real-life technology implementations and, in one particular case, show how IBM technology is keeping premature babies healthy.

The University of Ontario, Institute of Technology is using IBM systems and data analysis tools to detect potentially life-threatening infections in premature babies up to 24 hours earlier than medical staff was able prior to installing the technology.

A medical professional from the neonatal unit moderates the IBM Stream Computing for Smarter Healthcare video illustrating the technology in play.

The system uses IBM streams, DB2 and solidDB to analyze data that's flowing from all medical monitoring devices in the neonatal unit, while in motion. That means physicians and clinicians have a real-time look at all the data in one place which makes it easier to potential medical issues and that leads to a faster, proactive response, rather than a reactive response.

The system, which tracks 16 streams of data at some points, surpasses many other business analytics tools that require data to be at rest in a database for analysis and are often not flexible enough to run powerful analytics between unstructured and structed data.

Simply, it's data analysis in motion. And when the data does rest, it's available for potential research efforts.

As the video moderator notes, the technology has tremendous potential to change lives and to change work processes. In fact, it's already doing both.

It also illustrates how IBM is approaching 'Big Data.' Stay tuned for more on that next week.