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Getting an early
Y2K jump
PCWeek - October 5, 1998
Rituals are part of the history of the
United States' Indian tribes, but the Department of Interior's Bureau
of Indian Affairs didn't want to make its Y2K conversion project a ceremonial
effort.
The Department of the Interior decided last year to take a more aggressive stance than the U.S. government in its Y2K remediation efforts, setting a deadline of year's end. The federal government is aiming for a March 1999 deadline for compliance.
When the BIA, based in Albuquerque, N.M., began scouting for tools to handle its COBOL code, it looked for a solution that worked quickly and required a minimum of training time. "Many of the tools we looked at would work, but to train someone to use them would have taken as long as two weeks. And that would simply have taxed our resources," says Ed Socks, the BIA's year 2000 remediation project manager.
Even if the BIA did have the time, it might not have had the money. The Department of the Interior is expecting more funds for its Y2K work, but to date that money hasn't arrived. "We could have found ourselves in the middle of training but with no funds to draw on if training time was too excessive," he says.
Search and fix
BIA's quick fix came in the form of Data
Integrity Inc.'s Millennium Solution product, which uses a patented search-and-fix
technology and requires a minimum of training. When demonstrated on 8,000
lines of code at the BIA, the program ran through the code in 4 minutes,
which impressed the BIA.
The Waltham, Mass., company's search-and-fix
solution differs from conventional Y2K fixes, which use windowing. Windowing
changes date variables from two-digit years by temporarily adding a "19"
or "20" to each date found in computer code. However, appending the "19"
or "20" to existing two-digit date entries often impacts other systems,
requiring more remediation efforts, Socks explains. Millennium Solution
hunts for calculations where a two-digit code will cause a system error
but leaves other dates unaffected, which reduces impact on other systems.
|
U.S. Department of Interior/Bureau of Indian Affairs IT staff dedicated to Y2K: 10 programmers Lines of code: 4 million Line of code to be translated: 2.5 million Deadline for compliance: The U.S. Government has a deadline of March 1999, but the Department of the Interior has set a goal of completing all Y2K work by the end of the year. Special issues: As a single entity, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has much of its Y2K house in order, particularly once it has fully tested its COBOL code. But it's waiting for approval for extra money to test the code and that hasn't come through yet. Also, the BIA is charged with helping Indian tribes with their Y2K work in any way possible, and that will be an ongoing process through next year. |
Millennium Solution handles problems related to Y2K differently, as well. For example, a computer looking to determine the age of a person born in 1938 would calculate that figure as -38 in the year 2000. Millennium Solution simply adds 50 and then adds 50 again to arrive at the correct age of 62, according to Data Integrity officials. The program adds 50 twice instead of 100 because most programs don't recognize three-digit numbers, the officials explain.
The BIA in early summer purchased the product for $200,000. The BIA's 2.5 million lines of legacy COBOL code, which had once resided on relics--Unisys Corp. mainframes--had been transferred to a single Unisys ClearPath server, with the remaining 1.5 million lines of code now housed on a loose federation of PCs, servers and minicomputers,Socks says. Most of the code to be converted is associated with thebureau's land/record inventory system.
The BIA did have some doubts about the software since Millennium Solution was relatively new and untested. Although Data Integrity developed the product some time ago, it only recently received a patent on the process and began promoting it. Also, the product had been tested and designed for IBM mainframes, so a Unisys system would be an unproven environment for running the software.
Despite those questions, the payoff has been impressive, according to Socks. The BIA staff spent only 10 days in actual remediation, taking care of 1.58 million lines of code. According to Socks, the effort took 596 worker hours and was done only with internal staff, save for some help from Data Integrity. He estimates that the code fixes translated into about 14 cents per line, which is less than most other code work with which he has been involved.
Another benefit of Millennium Solution is the fact that it runs on desktop platforms, so that the Y2K work was offloaded from the mainframe and didn't interrupt ongoing processes. "Some of the solutions we looked at would have caused us to have sent some of our programs off-site," Socks says.
Next up for the BIA is testing, Socks says, which will consist of running through several dates to see how well the fixes work. Socks is less sure how the tool will perform on the BIA's non-COBOL systems, "which are another 1.5 million lines of code," he says.
But for the 1.58 million lines of code already run through the process, the BIA's Y2K problems are ancient history.
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