When I wasn't allowed to query systems older than I was

From June 2025

We all agree that Buzz Aldrin won Throwback Thursday for all time by sharing an image of the customs form he had to fill out when he returned from his trip to the moon. It lists the point of arrival as “Honolulu, Hawaii” and the point of departure as “The Moon.”

Nobody will ever top that, but I thought I would share some of my reminisces about working with enterprise technology in the 1990s for the edification of the Padawans.

Even before McKinsey, my first consulting project involved Days Sales Outstanding reduction for a telecom carrier. They had put all the responsibility for A/R across all products and segments into an independent business unit. Nobody asked me about the logic of this, but I was supposed to create analyses to in support of customer programs to reduce working capital.

In order to do analyses, you need data, but nobody had any. The business unit’s IT department thought providing data for business analysis was not an important part of its job. Eventually I made friends with one of the DBAs, and we would log onto the mainframe together and download massive amounts of raw data that I imported into a SQL database I built into MS-Access. [For our younger readers, before you could use a cloud database…oh never mind.]

This was awesome. I could analyze consumer A/R patterns by BTN and enterprise A/R by major account. It was awesome. Each consultant had a beat up metal desk on this big floor, and both other consultants and clients (who had nothing to do with our project) would crowd around my desk asking me to query my Access database. People starting calling me the counter-CIO, which I thought was pretty amusing.

One thing frustrated me no end — I didn’t have any A/R or payment data on mid-market customers. After lots of investigation, I figured out the data I wanted lived in a system called CRIS (Customer Record Information System), but nobody knew how to get a query run against it.

So I sat at my beat up metal desk, and called everyone I could think (using an actual landline telephone) to ask who could run a query against CRIS for me — then I would have all the data I needed. No luck.

Then one day my phone rang. The caller announced himself as Victor Rochambeau (not his real name), and asked if I knew who he was. Yes, I did. Victor was one of the most senior people in IT — no the type of person I was supposed to be talking to as a callow greenhorn.

Victor continued, “James, how old are you?”

I stuttered, “Excuse me?”

“How old are you?” he repeated.

“Twenty-six,” I replied.

“So you were born in 1970?” He asked. (This was in 1996.)

I assented.

Victor continued, “James, I have a new rule for you, so long as you are on this project. You are not allowed to request queries on systems older than you are.”

He went to to explain that they deployed CRIS in 1964 and ported it to minicomputers in the 1970s. And that ad-hoc queries crashed it. He was not crashing his system for my query.

I never did get any mid-market A/R data.