“As our president, Joe Tucci, is always saying, there are waves in technology, and Big Data, Cloud, and mobility are the biggest in 30 years,” says Tom Clancy, VP of Educational Services at EMC. “We have been offering week-long certification courses for IT in Big Data and cloud services for years. All our students tell us that their managers need something, too, to understand the issues.”

A separate survey EMC conducted showed the same thing — only 18 percent of respondents reported that their managers have “strong skills” in cloud and ITaaS, and only 16 percent believe their senior management are strong in Big Data Analytics. “Managers have to understand that these are driving a major transformation in business,” Clancy says. “It not just a matter of sending a few people to a week-long technology certification course.”

To fill this gap, EMC has announced two sets of courses focused on the business issues and opportunities of Cloud and IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) for Business Transformation and Big Data Analytics for Business Transformation for IT and business management from operational managers up to and including the C-suite. Each subject is covered in detail in a day-long course for operational management that discusses such issues as IT and business reorganization, required skill sets, business applications, and budgeting. Then each also includes a 90-minute executive summary module for C-suite executives who cannot spare a full day and need a higher level conceptual understanding of these waves.

These are delivered over the Internet as Instructor-Led Training (ILT) and recorded Video ILT and in on-site classes for companies with groups of managers who need the training. Participants do not have to be EMC customers. Some of the courses will be offered through Amazon.com. EMC already offers its technical certification courses in partnership with universities worldwide, and these courses will also be offered through that channel.

What management has to understand first is that this is much more than just another technology. These and their associated technologies including mobile are having an impact on business that is at least as big as that of the PC revolution of the 1980s. And while that took more than a decade to realize its complete potential, these are happening immediately.

For instance, ITaaS demands a complete reorganization of the ITO. CIOs know that it requires that they create a catalog of what IT offers the business as services and that they must decide which of these internal IT will continue to offer and which they will get from Cloud providers. Most shops are struggling to do that. But what it really requires is that IT abandon its traditional technological silos entirely and realign totally around delivering those services. No longer will ITOs have storage, server, and network groups. Instead they need a Financial Services group, an ERP group, a CRM group. The underlying infrastructure needs to be managed holistically to deliver the require QoS the business needs from that service, and budgeting must also be by service. If the ITO cannot or does not do this, the CIO can be sure that cloud providers can and do and that senior management understands utility-model services, whereas the traditional technology-dominated approach is so much mumbo-jumbo to them.

Big Data Analysis, similarly, is not about doing a better job of traditional rear-window analysis of the last quarter or year based on the presumption that the next will be more of the same. Never in history has that presumption been more erroneous. The next quarter will be different, and the expectations of customers are changing rapidly regardless of who those customers are. Companies that do not recognize that, or that depend on seat-of-the-pants guesses from managers to try to stay ahead of fast-evolving markets — which today is every market — will fail. Big Data Analytics is predictive, forward looking, whether it is applied to the revolution in customer needs or to when and in what way critical machinery or the nation’s infrastructure will fail. Without it businesses will be lost in the tidal wave of change. With it they can catch the wave, anticipate the next big change and arrive with the right products or services at the right moment to capitalize on it.

But just hiring a data scientist and buying a Hadoop server is not enough. Many companies need a team to handle their Big Data Analysis. And the best team can do little unless the company reorganizes to gain maximum advantage from that analysis, which requires a very different approach to business planning than the traditional methods that every manager learns in college.

These new courses are designed to give business & IT management base-line knowledge of these issues and what they mean for the business. The 90-minute executive modules cost $200. The one-day ITLs are $800, the Online ITLs are $1,000. On-site classes are $15,800.