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Has Indian Affairs found a silver date code bullet?
GOVERNMENT COMPUTER NEWS - August 3, 1998
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"Millennium Solution, from Data Integrity Inc. of Waltham, Mass., greatly sped up the Bureau of Indian Affairs date code work", said Ed Socks, BIA’s year 2000 project manager.
"The software fixes date code by redoing the math formulas, rather than by requiring date codes to have four-digit year entries", Socks said.
"Interior Department officials were skeptical when they first watched the Data Integrity tool at work", Socks said, "because the solution seemed too easy".
It was only when bureau officials ran through 8,000 lines of code in four minutes using the tool that Mona Infield, BIA branch chief, said she began to take notice. Date code remediation is usually labor-intensive, requiring teams of programmers, said Infield.
“It was so simple,” said Infield, who works in the bureau’s Albuquerque, N.M., office. Using the software, BIA also found a few errors in systems code that the bureau had already fixed by other means.
The bureau paid $200,000 for the program, according to Data Integrity spokesman, Doug Black. It searched and fixed 1.58 million lines of code over a 10-day period, which translates to about 14 cents per line, including labor costs.
"The tool helped put BIA ahead of its year 2000 schedule", said George Gover, acting director of BIA’s IRM Office.
"The software works by hunting out calculations where a two-digit date will cause a systems error", said Allen Burgess, chief executive officer of Data Integrity. "The software is efficient because it only makes a fix when a math function will trigger a problem, and not every time a two-digit date entry appears", he said.
"Some year 2000 tools require programmers to add two digits to each date occurrence in a line of code. But that leaves room for human error", Burgess said.
Another common automated year 2000 tool is windowing, which changes the formula logic so a program recognizes the date correction, essentially appending the 19 or 20 to existing two-digit date entries.
Thinking alike
The year 2000 problem is a question of math, according to Burgess. Systems have a problem with two-digit dates when the computer needs to figure a person’s age, for example. To figure how old a person born in 1938 is in 2000, systems using two-digit date fields would calculate that person as -38. Data Integrity’s tool adds 50 and then adds 50 again to arrive at the correct age of 62.The program adds 50 twice instead of 100 once, because an application that uses two-digit numbers for the calculation cannot recognize 100, Burgess explained.
BIA oversees land trusts for American Indian tribes in its Land Records Inventory System, officials said. "BIA wants to fix more than 2 million lines of code in its 15 mission-critical systems by December", Socks said.
"The tool is not a cure-all", Socks said. "Though it has worked well for BIA systems that are written in Cobol, it is unclear whether it will work with all code", he said.
Andy Bochman, a senior analyst for the Aberdeen Group of Boston, which examined Millennium Solution, said the program has yet to be fully tested in the field. “Before I completely recommend it, I’d like to see a few more people have luck with it,” he said.
Several financial institutions, including Citibank, Credit Suisse and NationsBank, have used the tool, but Data Integrity only began widely promoting it recently, after it received a patent, according to Burgess.
By Christopher J.
Dorobek
GCN Staff
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