How Frederick the Great and Napoleon Taught Me to Become a CTO | @BigDataExpo #BigData

Those of us who have been in IT since the early 90’s are all guilty of training our internal business partners to ask us for things that they don’t really want. We have trained them to ask us for reports. It started with the best of intentions – giving the business users information from our systems that they couldn’t get in any other way. I used to run a mainframe for a bank and did all of the nightly processing. Every night I would print off a four hundred page report that weighed in close to fifty pounds –at least that’s how I remember it – containing all of the checking account activity for our customers over the last twenty four hours. It’s hard to imagine anyone actually culling through it line by line every morning, looking for who knows what. I printed out that report dutifully none the less. I never did find out what they did with that report.

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