For 38 years, pacific gas & electric co. Had the same software application at the heart of its customer-information management system. The application handled the California utility's billing and credit-history tasks, managing 6.5 million customer accounts and cranking out 50,000 gas and electricity bills every day. Other PG&E systems, such as customer-service and maintenance apps, tapped into it for customer information. By the late 1990s, the system was showing its age. The mainframe application had become an unwieldy mass of spaghetti code with myriad modifications and ancillary apps bolted on. Any modification was extremely difficult―a big problem in an industry with frequently changing government regulations. Sometimes the daily billing cycle took more than 24 hours, and crediting payments often took two or three days. Without a PG&E service representative stepping in, consumers could have their power cut off when overdue payments weren't credited in time.
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