No longer do they only know what data manipulations they need;
they also have opinions on how the data manipulations should be executed,
and on which machine.
And they often know what the best hardware and software is for their needs. This is especially true at SF Bay where so many people have had a graduate education which involved, amongst other things, considerable work with computers. We don't need solutions anymore; what we need is someone to get us the hardware and software we want, and to make sure it works.