When I’ve referred to “non-technical” users, I’ve always meant just about anyone working far away IT. Well, based on research by Lyzasoft’s CEO Scott Davis, I think I’d better be careful with that definition.

My concern is not for IT people. It’s for the “quants” in finance, marketing, accounting and operations who may not write code or maintain computer networks but do go deep into math, data and logic most work days. These “quants” resent being called “non-technical” by the IT types. The quants shoot back: knowing SQL, they might point out, is easy compared with modeling demand elasticity.

The mutual disrespect is too bad, especially since the two technical types have more in common than those who rely on “guts.”

We forget most failed predictions quickly. If you make a bad one, you just say “let’s move on,” and you’re as good as moved on. But sometimes you meet the kind of guy I say hello to near my office—the kind professional forecasters hope they never meet.

When he and I get stuck in line together at the little grocery store, we talk mostly about the weather, and lately the forecasts for rain have been wrong. The other day he grumbled, “And they never apologize.”

The weatherpeople never apologize? I’d never heard that before. What if there are more of these guys out there—reading my trend predictions for 2009?

Last January, after of having to predict trends for 2008, I bought a book about forecasting—actually, fortune telling, which is similar. The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading (2005; Ian Rowland) is practically a how-to for would-be psychics. I read about it in a New Yorker article’s unflattering comparison of the FBI’s profiling operation with storefront psychics.

The trick, essentially, is in the phrasing. Say it so you’re right no matter what the truth is. It works because most consumers want to believe you. But you knew that.

In early 2009, when all the forecasts are all in, when the last drop has fallen, I’m going to put them all together to look at the trends foretold by all the trend-spotters. All in one bucket. Bucket of what? We’ll see.

We all know BI’s ostensible price tag: the software, the hardware and the peopleware. But a new essay by Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters, programmer and venture capitalist, suggests that poorly managed BI might have yet another cost: the cost of thwarting creativity and zeal.

In business, we try to control what we must. We watch, deliberate, reflect and predict. We’re often neurotic. With BI, we watch more closely than ever.

Graham talks about how these “checks”—such as procedures to verify a vendor’s solvency—inflate the cost of software. He writes that programmers are especially sensitive to checks, which can drive them out of their minds or out of the company.

For good programmers, one of the best things about working for a startup is that there are few checks on releases. In true startups, there are no external checks at all. If you have an idea for a new feature in the morning, you can write it and push it to the production servers before lunch. And when you can do that, you have more ideas.

At big companies, software has to go through various approvals before it can be launched. And the cost of doing this can be enormous—in fact, discontinuous. I was talking recently to a group of three programmers whose startup had been acquired a few years before by a big company. When they’d been independent, they could release changes instantly. Now, they said, the absolute fastest they could get code released on the production servers was two weeks.

This didn’t merely make them less productive. It made them hate working for the acquirer.

He writes about software and programmers, but you know this happens in many other industries. More people than we realize are like those programmers. Most people can’t flee to a startup, so they smother the inner artist and gear down.

If, as Steve Jobs has been quoted, “Artists ship,” then artists hate it when they can’t ship. Programmers are particularly vulnerable to checks, writes Graham. “These guys would have paid to be able to release code immediately.” He goes on, “If you don’t let people ship, you don’t have any artists.”

There we go again: It’s the soft stuff that matters.

My article in today’s BI This Week. BI veterans give tech workers advice on getting ahead in the industry without burning out first.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Jon Carroll, whose column is one of the first places I go in the morning, relayed this joke from a reader in his column today.

Realizing he was lost, a balloonist dropped down to ask directions. “Excuse me, but I’m a little off course,” he shouted. “I promised to meet a friend an hour ago. I don’t know where I am.”

A woman yelled back, “You’re in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You’re at exactly 40 degrees, 22 minutes and 21 seconds north latitude and 70 degrees, 30 minutes and 33 seconds west longitude.”

“Amazing,” the balloonist replied. “You must be an engineer!”

“I am,” she replied. “How did you know?”

“Well, everything you told me is technically correct, but I can’t use your information. I’m still lost, and you haven’t been much help at all. If anything, you’ve delayed my trip.”

The woman thought for a moment, then replied, “You must be in management.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well, you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You’ve risen to your position due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. In fact, you’re in exactly the same position you were before we met, but somehow it’s now my fault.”

The business intelligence author Tony Politano said this morning that technology as a career is a “dead end.” When I heard him say it, I knew it was my lead for next week’s story in BI This Week on BI careers.

He’s the author of Chief Performance Officer: Measuring What Matters, Managing What Can Be Measured (2003, iUniverse) and a frequent instructor at TDWI events.

Actually, he says it often. It’s his non-violent way of shaking young techies by the scruff of their necks.

“You’d be amazed at how many people who’ve worked 25 years in a bank don’t know the difference between commercial banking and investment banking,” he said.

They’re wiser to learn business, he tells them, because that knowledge is how those who run companies will calculate their worth.

Besides, offshoring and outsourcing are “eating the technology business from the bottom up.” Those who last will be the ones with knowledge the guys in China and India-or even some closer-can’t match.

“Business knowledge has the shelf life of macaroni and cheese,” he said. “Technical knowledge is like milk.” It always comes with a “use by” date.