Technology Corridor

For most energy firms, the returns on investments in customer relationship management have been profoundly disappointing.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when big cars were all the rage, energy companies were developing the first systems designed to store and print customer billing data. These early version of the customer information system (CIS), written in FORTRAN and COBOL, ran on massive mainframes. The architectural model was simple. CIS systems connected thousands of functional points in lockstep sequences. Metering data went in at one end and bills came out the other. System access points were few and tightly restricted.

CIS grew out of the need to bill a stable customer base for a measured amount of commodity at uniform rates. Data models for these systems were built around metering and meter locations. Rigid file structures were very expensive to change. Even minor modifications required reprogramming, potentially jeopardizing the stability of the whole system. Adding a new product could take a year or more.

These constraints were acceptable because energy companies needed to know only a few basic things about their customers, and what they did need to know changed very slowly, if at all. For roughly 30 years, from the end of World War II to the oil crisis of 1973, energy supplies and prices were remarkably stable. For most of this period costs actually fell as energy companies introduced improved generation and transmission technologies and created new economies of scale. Regulation was minimal and aimed primarily at protecting the financial integrity of the "public utility" from the holding company abuses rampant in the 1920s. Investor returns were modest but guaranteed and-in the case of many municipals-tax free.