Conversion Crunch -- Businesses turn to automated tools to complete year 2000 compliance efforts
InformationWeek
January 05, 1998, Issue: 663
Section: Hot In '98:Year 2000 Tools
Link: techweb.com
This year will be crunch time for industrywide year 2000 compliance efforts, and the smart companies are looking at the problem comprehensively. "The pressure is mounting, and the more this pressure mounts, the more erratic people will respond when they find out just how much work there is," says Michael Sanders, VP of information services for Commerce Bancshares Inc. in Kansas City, Kan.
According to projections from Gartner Group Inc., more than half of all companies worldwide won't be properly prepared for the year 2000 problem. Due mostly to a narrow scope of vision, companies are either deluding themselves about their level of preparedness, or they're underestimating the size, cost, and time it will take to complete such an effort. That's why more companies are turning to automated testing and compliance tools to help accelerate the process. "Companies are moving away from manual conversion," says Randy Zivan, director of software modernization services at Mastech Corp., a year 2000 software developer in Pittsburgh. "The trend is more toward getting outside help, since these projects are far and above those ever imagined."
When deciding on what products or services to implement, the most important factors include:what types of systems are run, how many lines of code exist, how much the project will cost, how long it will take, and what resources are available. There are also human resource factors to consider: Highly skilled workers are scarce and programmers find year 2000 efforts tedious and intrusive on existing responsibilities. Also, the systems requiring work are in many cases old and missing documentation.
What's more, it's becoming a project in itself for most companies to define exactly what compliance means. "Compliance is a process that says you use specific testing tools to assess application and use standard testing tools so that future dates can be run in applications," says Jerry Bonello, director of year 2000 development for Frontier Corp. in Bingham Farms, Mich., the fifth-largest provider of nationwide long-distance service.
Bonello says different companies will have different interpretations of the year 2000 problem. "We're really struggling for a complete definition of compliance," he says. "I don't think there's an overall definition in the industry as to what a company has to do."
Frontier announced in November that it will implement Platinum Technology Inc.'s TransCentury Analysis Tools to convert up to 21 million lines of code in its IT infrastructure. TransCentury Analysis uses parsing technology to help companies identify and analyze enterprise environments for faulty date occurrences. A
complementary product, Calendar Routines, uses interactive code generation to automatically fix noncompliant date logic.
"I can't tell a company what's right or wrong in terms of compliance, only the costs of going one way or another," says Hal Carr, VP of application life cycle development at Platinum Technology's Phoenix office. "We put together a factory process to get through this rapidly," adds Carr. "We exercise all test cases that Platinum and the client have agreed on to insure compliance for that date."
Keep It Simple
Given the time constraint, one major trend for year 2000 work this year will be ease of use. "We wanted ease of use, where the learning curve is low," says James Martin, a senior product consultant at Merrill Lynch's offices in Jersey City, N.J.
Merrill Lynch has contracted with Turnkey 2000 in San Jose, Calif., for $500,000 worth of its Unravel 2000, an integrated code conversion tool that combines conversion technology with project management functionality and automates up to 90% of the programmers' work. Unravel makes impact assessments and generates reports that summarize the time, cost, and resources spent on a conversion project.
Martin says Merrill Lynch, which tested the product for five weeks in October, will deploy Unravel from its headquarters in New York in the first quarter. He found the project-management component particularly useful, since it lets users edit the project schedule and cut development time.
"My primary question is, Am I looking at all of my code? If this wasn't a part of their functionality, it would not be worth looking at." Martin says Merrill Lynch hopes to reach system compliance by December, and adds that, "Without this software, it's not possible."
Automated tools will be the quick-fix sought by companies that want to get up to speed quickly, that didn't have a compliance strategy in place last year, or that are falling behind schedule.
"The biggest trend we see is that companies are not as far along as they hoped to be," says Mastech's Zivan. Mastech offers automated year 2000 solutions, called SmartApps, across multiple platforms. Mastech's year 2000 development is based on a
"factories" approach: It creates economies of scale and support across all platforms and equipment. Mastech addresses mainframe and client-server platforms, and most programming languages. Mastech's customers include IBM and EDS.
Eye On Vendors
Frontier's Bonello cautions that going outside the company to get help requires close scrutiny of vendors. "A lot depends on who that vendor is and how pervasive their software is in the market," he says. "Where you're handcuffed is when you're relying on vendors to have a reliable solution. There's a lot of risk out there."
Commerce Bancshares has been planning its strategy since mid-1996 for systems ranging from legacy, to browsers, to telecommunications and enterprise networks. Most of these systems are based on Cobol, which fueled Commerce Bancshares' decision to use Computer Associates' Fix 2000 solution. "We use Fix 2000 to identify
and automate our systems," says VP Sanders.
Resource Shortage
After querying vendors about their compliance schedules, Sanders says he understands why most companies-including his own-are looking for automation. "There aren't enough resources to go around," he says. "The market is tight, and the number of people available to help is scarce." Sanders defines resources as <b/>Cobol programmers who know the technology and who can correct a problem when testing isn't working. "That's why finding a system that will automate the project is important for us," Sanders says.
According to CA, automation means minimizing the risk of choosing an inappropriate method of date correction, increasing accuracy as multiple methods are implemented for specific date fields, and converting code in a shorter period of time.
After a few hiccups with early versions of the CA software, Commerce Bancshares came to the same conclusions. "We did have problems with the beta," says Sanders. A test copy of Fix 2000 did not initially capture some of the dates as expected. But support from CA programmers extended Sanders' confidence in the solution, even after the problems with the beta copy were resolved.
In addition, after running Fix 2000 against code that had been manually programmed, the automated tool proved more efficient. "This allowed us to get to the testing phase a lot sooner, the find-and-fix approach was simple, and we like the idea of doing that all at once," Sanders says.
Because companies are paying attention mostly to their applications, they can sometimes overlook other important elements of the IT architecture-such as networking. For that reason, vendors are working to get companies to pay more attention to the compliance level of their network systems.
"It's pretty much out of sight, out of mind," says Art Dolimpio, director of marketing management at Bell Atlantic Network Integration in Frazer, Pa., a network integration subsidiary of Bell Atlantic. The unit recently launched Network 2000, an assessment program that helps companies identify date-change problems in their networks, and work out compliance strategies. "We ask customers to provide an accurate picture of what their network components are and we compare it to our database to identify what's compliant or not," says Dolimpio. "The deliverable is a report based on that."
For instance, one often-overlooked area of year 2000 compliance is the LAN. "Incorrect date components in a network could interrupt the token delivery in a token ring LAN," Dolimpio notes. "You can have a company spending millions of dollars converting all
Cobol applications, but on the morning of the new millennium, they won't have access to them because the token rings won't deliver the message."
Some vendors and users say that, in addition to all of the work involved with approaching a definition of compliance, and implementing that definition effectively, there is still the task of surveying suppliers, partners, banks, and customers. This process not only creates more questions, it adds some unspoken elements to the year 2000 effort:assessment, testing, implementation-and risk management.
Frontier now includes risk management in the overall compliance scheme, Bonello says. "If a partner tells me their system is going to be compliant in October 1999, and it takes six months to implement, that doesn't give me a level of comfort," he says. "If you don't feel confident with a partner's solutions, you can always look for another partner or take that application and make it compliant yourself."
Case-By-Case Basis
Most companies agree that if they are using software from a vendor or sharing a system with a partner that is not compliant, they will stick it out depending on the how important the relationship is. "We're going to evaluate them on a case-by-case basis
and it could be different with each supplier," says Bob Niedzwiecki, project director for application development and the year 2000 at United Stationers Supply Co., a supplier of business products and office supplies in Des Plaines, Ill. "We're actively in communications with vendors and customers to make sure our business process is uninterrupted."
As the time ticks away toward the year 2000, that level of trust in vendors and partners, their tools, their services, and their level of compliance will be mandated by the pressure to meet internal deadlines. As with most things in life, the more you prepare
and test, the better you perform.
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Note* the same forces of demand and supply that is forcing companies to use tools from vendors instead of manually converting code, will also change the focus to an automated factory approach. If you can't find the people to use the tools, you have to turn you project over to a conversion house or service provider. Once the flood gates open and the bulk of the business flows in, even the service providers will be overwhelmed. It is my opinion that they too will eventually have to send business to companies like ConSyGen. |
