I often hear from people that theirs is a ‘relationship business’, and that it therefore isn’t really susceptible to the influence of technology.

In my experience, there are two different types of businesses that are driven mainly by relationship: commodity businesses – where any choice is as good as any other – and businesses with terrible data – where people have no idea if any choice is better than any other.

In commodity businesses, perhaps that makes sense.  If you’re buying crates of #10 envelopes – all roughly the same in terms of quality or price – you might as well buy from the guy with whom you’d like to have expense account drinks.

But in data-less businesses, the situation is far less sensible.  A restaurateur stocks a given liquor due to relationship only because he can’t quantify whether his customers would more likely purchase a different drink, in a way that would yield better profits, customer satisfaction, or other ROI.

And, indeed, in the majority of professional or creative businesses – from medicine and law, to music, film, publishing, and fashion – where so many decisions are ‘relationship-driven’, I strongly, strongly suspect things fall into that second, less sensible, data-less relationship category.  Decision-guiding data has already started showing up increasingly in those worlds; as the data trickle turns to flood over the next five years, those industries will start looking very different than they do today.