Thomas Hoffman and Mitch Betts
05/19/97 from Computerworld
You glide into your office building on Monday morning, Jan. 3, 2000, confident that your information
systems have been prepared for the 00 date. But the elevator won't budge. The building is cold
because the heat doesn't work. And you can't place a telephone call because the PBX is down.
That's the worst-case scenario if your IS department's year 2000 experts keep their blinders on and
ignore the date rollover problem that could confuse a wide variety of commercial systems outside
traditional IS control. Those range from elevators and heating controls to medical devices and bank
vaults.
The problem is that some systems outside the data center have embedded chips, real-time clocks or
scheduling programs with two-digit date fields. Those could cause problems when they hit 00.
With software, experts can predict with reasonable assurance that 90% of those applications whose
year 2000 problems haven't been fixed will fail. But nobody knows what percentage of equipment
with embedded systems will fail, said Peter de Jager, a leading year 2000 expert and president of de
Jager & Co. in Brampton, Ontario. But is this really something IS departments already scrambling to
fix mainframe, midrange and PC systems should add to their crowded agendas?
The answer is yes, according to the vast majority of three dozen IS executives interviewed by
Computerworld. "If we don't do it, who will?" asked Mary Lynne Perushek, vice president of IS at
Norstan, Inc., a Plymouth, Minn.-based data communications equipment and services supplier.
Perushek and her staff re-cently began meeting withmanagers in Norstan's engineering and
telecommunications groups to help them identify and prioritize which equipment needs to be
examined first, such as internal switches and routers.
At Yankee Gas Services Co. in Meriden, Conn., the IS department has worked closely with its
facilities management department to identify equipment that could be date-sensitive. The company
then contacts the vendors that make badge readers and other systems to inquire about plans to make
their equipment year 2000-compliant, said Scott R. Waleski, director of information technology and
services at the gas distributor.
Yet many other IS executives said they don't have the resources to take the lead role. Instead, they
are acting as internal consultants to help the facilities management department and other affected
departments. "Our resources are already strained on this. I'm not sure we should spearhead work
that has to be done in other areas," said Steve Heckler, senior vice president and chief information
officer at Sony Pictures Entertainment in Culver City, Calif.
But the consulting role is working at Central Maine Power Co. (CMP). Like other utilities, it faces
the double trouble of fixing its legacy computer appli-cations and the date-sensitive chips embedded
in its transformers and power equipment. Because the IS group has the most year 2000 project
experience within the Augusta, Maine-based company, the IS year 2000 project manager meets
regularly with the facilities management team to share project-management experiences, said Rocko
P. Graziano, a senior business systems analyst at CMP.
SETTING PRIORITIES
Besides offering project-management tips, IS managers can also help other departments set
priorities. CMP's year 2000 project team meets regularly with its engineering and facilities
management representatives to help those groups determine which operations are most critical and
must be acted upon first, Graziano said.
Likewise, BankBoston's millennium project team is working with other departments, such as
telecommunications and facilities management, to determine whether the year 2000 date "is a threat
to their particular department," said Steven McManus, communications manager for the bank's
millennium project team. "From the get-go, we have said that this is not just an IT problem; this is a
business problem," McManus said.
Ann K. Coffou, an analyst at Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Mass., listed the following
potential year 2000 problems: Most elevators have embedded systems that shut down the elevator if
scheduled maintenance isn't performed after a certain length of time. If the elevator system interprets
00 as 1900, the calculation will be thrown off and thousands of elevators could be grounded.
Michael Thomas, executive vice president of Schindler Elevator Corp. in Morristown, N.J., said it is
true that elevators have two-digit year fields. But he said elevator systems don't make date-critical
calculations, so that shouldn't be a problem. Still, many customers are requiring Schindler to certify
that theirelevators will work after thecentury rollover.
Telephone systems such as private branch exchanges may not be able to recognize the century
change, resulting in improper billing and incorrectly time-stamped voice mail. Electronic time clocks,
security systems, parking lot gates and vaults could malfunction. Testing shows that some fax
machines will work and some won't. Programmable sprinkler systems could spurt into action Jan. 1,
2000 in the middle of winter in many locales and cause water or ice damage.
TESTING TIME
Meanwhile, vendors that build automation systems, such as programmable heating and
air-conditioning systems, are busily testing their systems to identify year 2000 problems.
Honeywell, Inc. in Milwaukee, for example, is testing its products this year and will make
recommendations to users next year, a spokeswoman said. Johnson Controls, Inc. in Milwaukee
has discovered that its Metasys facilities management system with roughly 5,000 users has a
two-digit year field. It will be fixed in a software upgrade this year, an official said.
Some customers are sending formal letters to their building-automation vendors, asking whether their
systems can cope with the year 2000, noted Mark Weldy, vice president and general manager at
Trane Co.'s Building Automation Systems unit in St. Paul, Minn. Weldy said Trane has received
several such letters and is responding to them. He said the customer letters tend to begin, "As part of
our plan to address the year 2000, we request the following information about your product. ..." That
sounds strikingly similar to the letters IS managers are sending to their software vendors. In other
words, customers want to avoid walking into unheated buildings on Jan. 3, 2000.
A costly specter
A recent congressional hearing featured testimony about the dire consequences of failing to fix the
year 2000 problem in a wide variety of systems and devices from automobile electronics and coffee
makers to automated teller machines and video recorders. The testimony raised the specter of costly
testing and repairs, product-liability lawsuits, bankruptcies, economic downturn and government
regulation.
But some analysts warn against too much alarmism. The year 2000 snafus for appliances such as
VCRs will be merely annoying, not catastrophic. "Those rare devices that will fail will do so in a
harmless way," said Lindsey Vereen, editor of Embedded Systems Programming in San Francisco.
Still, some year 2000 glitches could have serious consequences. Medical devices such as patient
monitors and infusion pumps are likely to be affected if they use a real-time clock that doesn't have a
four-digit date field, says researcher Alan Barbell. Barbell is conducting a year 2000 investigation at
ECRI, a research institute in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., that evaluates medical devices. "Devices sold in
the last few years are usually 2000-compliant. But there's a whole lot of stuff that's older than that
and people still use," Barbell said.
One manufacturer recently recalled a shipment of heart defibrillators after learning the devices
couldn't handle the century change, according to congressional testimony. The defibrillators had a
clock that calculated the time since the last maintenance check; once the date passes, the device
won't work.
Many medical-device vendors are addressing the issue, but ECRI advises hospital engineers to ask
vendors what steps they are taking. ECRI also urges hospitals to test equipment by setting the
real-time clock to Dec. 31, 1999, and seeing what happens but only after the device is disconnected
from patient systems. |
