In a panel on big data in small business at IBM PartnerWorld, IBM Program Director of Energy Technology David Barnes said “geeks are cool now,” referring to the rising status of developer and data scientists in the Facebook age. Geeks may be cool, but IBM desperately wants to keep the geeks and the business people separate. It’s a strategy that might help IBM sell more bundled software and service packages, but it’s not good for the customers.

Everyone seems to agree that today technology is critical to business success. And business people are increasingly involved in technology decisions. The C level is getting more involved in tech, from CEOs pressuring IT to go to the cloud, to the increased involvement of CFOs in IT purchases to CMOs adopting social media tools. Vendors are bypassing IT and trying to sell directly to the C level.

But people start getting uncomfortable when you suggest that maybe the business people need to learn a bit more about what’s going on under the hood of those shiny new big data systems. IBM’s people balk at the idea that C level execs need a more hands-on understanding of the technology used at their company. I’m not saying that CEOs need to be able to write map-reduce jobs or that CFOs should be deploying cloud servers with Chef. But according to IBM staffers like Barnes, business people shouldn’t even have to know what Hadoop is, let alone how it compares to other technologies or whether it powers their company’s analytics engines. And it’s not just IBM – many of the analysts I talked to at the conference agree. The line is usually that business people need to focus on running the business, let the geeks handle the tech stuff. But with the line between business and tech blurring, can business people afford not to know this stuff?

Even the most unlikely of businesses are affected by IT now. How can staying ignorant about technology possibly help anyone except for vendors?

An Unusual Example

Let’s take the example of restaurants. These businesses tend to be very small, unless they’re large national chains, and it’s may not seem that information technology, let along data mining and analytics, would have anything to do with them.

But think about how IT has affected the restaurant business:

1. Credit card machines have become standard.
2. Websites with a restaurant’s hours, menu and – if you’re luck- today’s specials have become fairly common.
3. OpenTable is making it easy for any restaurant to have online reservations.
4. Social media and review sites like Yelp help proprietors gather more customer feedback than ever before.

Where does analytics come into this? Well, what sort of insights might be gleaned by mining online reservation data? Or by mining Twitter, Facebook or Yelp for customer information? Could that provide data that could help a restaurateur better plan staffing or purchasing? It might be hard to justify the cost of some of those higher end big data applications and appliances, but there’s certainly insight to be gleaned by a small local businesses.

Look at the progression of these technologies. Having a credit card machine may have been a competitive advantage once, but now it’s something we generally expect when we walk into any restaurant. Having a website with your hours and menu listed may still provide some competitive advantage, but tools like Google Sites, Tumblr and Squarespace make building and maintaining a website remarkably cheap and easy. Not long ago adding the sort of interactivity required for online reservations would have required a programmer. Now OpenTable has made it trivial from a technical standpoint. Each of these competitive advantages becomes commoditized in time.

So let’s say IBM comes out with a special version of Cognos for small local restaurant, coffee shops and bars. Let’s say it can suck in info from OpenTable, Yelp, Google Places, etc. Plus it can monitor Twitter and Facebook mentions and can correlate all this data to help a business figure out when to expect spikes in business, when to expect to be slow and maybe even some ways to change-up its ad spend. These improvements shave off margins and improve the dining experience (no one wants to eat someplace that’s understaffed and keeps running out of ingredients). IBM’s consultants figure out where to get the data, how to get it, what technology to use to store and process the data under the hood and, perhaps most importantly, what questions to answer with data. The customer doesn’t have to know what a Twitter firehose is, or whether there’s DB2 or MongoDB under the hood or how to make the system answer a question that isn’t preset.

And if it works, pretty soon every restaurant in town will be using it, or some competing version that works just as well. As new data sources become available, or new technologies for processing data expand the possibilities of what sort of questions can be asked and answered the customer can only wait for IBM to update the product or wait for IBM or or some other company to come out with a whole new product. Meanwhile, the original product has gone from being a competitive advantage to being a cost of doing business. And there’s nothing the restaurant can do but wait for someone else to release a new, better product.

OK, Maybe I Took That Example Too Far…

In the restaurant business this may actually be fine. Having some sort of high tech research and development may not yield enough return in the food industry. I don’t even know if would have been worth the cost of hiring a coder to develop an online reservation system back before OpenTable. But you can see how technology can play an unexpected role in business, and how it can quickly go from an advantage to an requirement.

And in many businesses, it will be well worth it to stay ahead of the curve. And in order to do that, business people will need to understand technology at least well enough to grasp what’s possible. Today that may mean, for example, knowing what Hadoop is, and that on its own it’s not good for doing real-time analysis. It means not only knowing that you can analyze the Twitter firehose, but knowing what sorts of insights you might be able to glean from it. It means knowing about APIs and data markets and what they make possible.

It’s Time to Get Geeky

Last year in his keynote at WebVisions, Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed, said that not understanding programming is not equivalent not being able to work on your own car. He said not understanding programming is more like not only not knowing how to drive, but not even knowing where your driver is taking you. Rushkoff has a broad definition of programming, and doesn’t think everyone necessarily needs to learn yet alone become an expert at C++ programming. But he does think that everyone should start to understand the workings of the systems they depend on.

In her talk at Strata Summit last October, J.C. Herz said that many of the executives she encounters treat analytics like an occult phenomena: “it’s very powerful, they don’t understand it and the practitioners possess arcane knowledge.” Clients come to her and say they want analytics. She asks what they want the analytics to do, but the customers don’t know. They just know they want analytics. She points out that: “Even tarot requires a question.” She urges data scientists to provide more education to executives, but says she actually gets a lot of push back from business people who think they either don’t need to or can’t understand analytics. It’s time for that push back to stop.

Jon Stewart’s criticism of Congress applies just as well to executives as it does to politicians:

ServicesAngle

Of course buying pre-packaged solutions built by expert data scientists may outweigh the benefits of building something custom and from scratch in-house. But relying on a completely packaged black box solution from a vendor, without any knowledge of what’s going on or how to ask new questions or what sort of questions can be even be asked, is like getting in a can in a city you don’t know without the address of your hotel and just hoping the cab driving gets you there.

Understanding technology is no longer optional. Executives that don’t want their businesses to be completely at the mercy of vendors need to start getting geeky.

Your Angle

What do you think? Am I way off base? Or maybe I’m not taking the idea far enough? Leave a comment and let us know.