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Y2K vendor supplies solution for BIA fix 

Federal Computer Week -  July 20, 1998  
The Bureau of Indian Affairs has nearly finished fixing its Year 2000 software problems using a tool called Millennium Solution™ from Data Integrity Inc., Waltham, Mass.  

BIA officials have finished renovating most of BIA's major systems and plan this week to test the systems to make sure they will work as they did before the fix. BIA is the first federal customer for dii, which is just beginning to market its product to federal customers.  

Millennium Solution is a PC-based solution in which users download chunks of code from a mainframe to a desktop computer. The software - which works with Cobol, PL/1 and Assembler languages - searches for any line of code that involves a date and some sort of calculation - not only addition, subtraction and other arithmetic but "greater than" and "less than" functions. The software then fixes that code by adding two extra calculations - the addition, twice, of 50.  

For example, a noncompliant system calculating the age of someone in the Year 2001 would subtract the birth year - say, 1936 - from 2001 by using only the last two digits of each year. The calculation, therefore, becomes "01 minus 36," which is negative 35. But adding 50 to negative 35 makes the answer 15. And adding 50 to 15 makes 65, which is the correct age.  

The program does not rewrite the code to add 100 because adding 100 - a three-digit number rather than a two-digit number like 50 - would require extensive code renovation to accommodate calculations with more than two digits. "We use 50 to stay in the two-digit world," company president Allen Burgess said.   

Millennium Solution is designed to search for code that includes dates and calculations, rather than just dates, as a way to avoid making unnecessary changes to code, the company said. "People are fixing things they don't need to fix," said Christopher Dowdell, Vice President of dii. "We fix all of the math issues, which are the problems."   

Already, large corporations such as Citibank, Credit Suisse First Boston and NationsBank are using the dii product.   

BIA only has about 3 million lines of code that need examining, according to Burgess. At BIA, the systems that have been repaired with the dii product process information primarily for trust funds that the federal government manages for American Indians.  

The systems, known collectively as the Indian Trust System, have come under fire in recent years by groups that say the systems cannot produce accurate and timely data on the status of individuals' trust accounts. BIA is planning to replace the system.   

In the meantime, the agency has decided that it must fix the Year 2000 problem in case a new system does not come together in time. "We're really doing this more in self-defense than in anything else," said Mona Infield, chief of the applications support branch at BIA's Office of Information Resources Management.   

BIA began working with the dii product in May, and Infield said cost estimates for the renovation are about $0.14 per line of code. So far, Infield said, she has seen no indication that the dii product will not complete the work.  

If the project is successful, dii hopes to leverage that success to gain more federal customers, Burgess said.  
By L. Scott Tillett 

White Paper Available by Request