Oil producers are trying to cultivate analytical technology to turn a growing reservoir of "big data" into digestible chunks of information that engineers can use to extract bigger bounties of crude or even predict when equipment might fail. The oil industry hasn't been a pioneer in adopting advanced data analytics, as it's still far behind the pharmaceutical, insurance and healthcare sectors, said Riccardo Bertocco, a partner with Bain & Company in Dallas. Still, it's clear that the technology is spreading rapidly in the oil sector, Bertocco said.