The challenge
The billing data held the answers to most of the operational questions anyone wanted to ask. That was never in doubt.
Getting an answer out of it was the problem, because that meant knowing how to query it. So a question took one of two routes. It went to whoever could run the report and waited its turn — or, more often and more expensively, it went unasked. A question you have to file a request for is a question most people quietly drop.