Delight the user: not much beyond sending a file to some user with accomanying words watch this! Which would result in an immediate shutdown. Those were the days before we even started to worry about Y2k.
Anyhow, regarding system usage, a colleague used to download a stack of data and processed them in MS Access on his local machine. Each single step would take at least one full day, the whole procedure well over a week. I, having to reproduce this calculations, abhoring said tool and showing a lack of patience, rewrote the queries and ran them directly on the production SQL servers. The whole shebang completed within a few minutes. That is, certainly less than an hour, or so. During which the system was not exactly responsive. Much to delight of the real users...
After some friendly nugding by the IT operations team I redesigned the queries again to run well under five minutes and ran them outside office hours.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
