zdnet.com
February 15, 1999 9:00 AM ET
Y2K odyssey
By Peter Coffee, PC Week Labs
As they approach the Y2K finish line, many organizations are looking for ways to bring remediation projects to a successful conclusion. Most, however, still have miles to go. In a weeklong Labs On Site investigation, during which PC Week Labs hit the road to evaluate year 2000 projects at more than a dozen organizations, we found that the best-prepared enterprises combine internal readiness with an intensifying focus on external supply chain partners. For most, those efforts will last well into next year.
PC Week Labs staff and PC Week Corporate Partners Bruce Brorson and Dan Willis visited several Minnesota companies and evaluated the steps they have taken to identify and resolve Y2K issues, as well as the protections they are putting into place to gird themselves against problems up and down the supply chain. Although all are located in the country's heartland, these enterprises cover a wide spectrum, including retail, health care and manufacturing companies; government agencies; and utilities. This package will let IT managers compare their companies' assessment and testing readiness against the experience and recommendations of organizations that have demonstrated credible Y2K efforts.
In Minnesota, the year 2000 starts in two weeks. "Sunday, Feb. 28, is the first day of our fiscal [year] 2000," explained Laurie Bauer, a manager with Best Buy Co. Inc., in Eden Prairie, during a conversation with PC Week Labs. "Our remediation [was] complete as of Dec. 28, including testing with our mainframe systems."
In many ways, however, this well-prepared appliance and consumer electronics retailer is still very much in the midst of its Y2K effort. Assuring readiness of suppliers--and answering questions from customers--will keep Best Buy's Y2K Command Center busy for the rest of the year. (See story on PC Week Labs' evaluation of Best Buy's Y2K efforts.)
Best Buy is not alone. We found that many organizations are either still in the midst of putting out Y2K fires or are finding new, hidden problems.
"In December, we had to roll our accounting calendar," explained Dennis Forstrom, IT coordinator at custom store fixture maker Environments Inc., in Minnetonka. "We were probably two weeks away from installing the year 2000 version of our accounting and manufacturing software. My accounting manager entered 00, he hit Enter, and it locked up.
"[The software] was so confused that it wouldn't let us go back and change it," Forstrom added. "The data was inaccessible." A programmer's surgical intervention, using a previous version of the software, was needed to restore operation. "We would have been DOA if we hadn't been able to get a programmer's help," he said.
Mammoth manufacturer 3M Corp. has 10 people working full time on Y2K issues and 300 people addressing Y2K on at least a part-time basis (see story).
"We have software that has been through at least three iterations of scanning by different tools," said Mary Cripe, 3M's year 2000 project manager, in St. Paul. "And even in that third iteration, we have found new potential defects."
Cripe is philosophical about the diminishing returns of 3M's Y2K efforts. "We have applications that have been running for 10 or 15 years, and we're still uncovering bugs. Not Y2K bugs specifically, but bugs. What's to make one think that all Y2K bugs have been found?"
Despite their companies' size difference, Cripe and Forstrom expressed common concerns about relationships with other organizations. "I'm concerned about our business partners being able to deliver a product to 3M when we need it," Cripe said, while Environments' Forstrom said his company is "discussing our buffer against supply chain interruptions."
It's a long, long chain
Many companies could underestimate the length of their business relationships chain--a chain that may be stressed to the breaking point by Y2K.
"A lot of banks are being purchased because they can't deal with Y2K," said Environments' operations vice president, Dave Schoenberger. "NationsBank [Corp.] buys Barnett Banks--we just went through all of Florida and did Barnett Banks last year, and now we have to do a NationsBank retrofit."
PC Week Labs found a similar situation at Mercury Minnesota Inc., a Faribault-based maker of enclosures and other support hardware built to order for computer systems vendors, including IBM. "We're seeing the year-end rush carry over into the first part of this year," said Julie Lehman, Mercury's IT manager and one-woman IT shop. "Our customers are saying that it's because of Y2K that people want to get systems in place."
Delivery times for custom cabinets may not show up on a company's initial list of Y2K vulnerabilities. Such second-order risks require careful consideration, lest a company find that its Y2K remediation plans cannot be carried out before the immovable deadline.
'Scope creep' broadens Y2K agendas
At every site we visited, PC Week Labs found a Y2K team whose purview had quickly grown beyond the bounds of its organization's computers. At some companies, IT managers have been forced to intensify their focus on embedded systems.
"We thought we had our medical equipment inventoried," said William MacNally, system vice president for information operations at Allina Health System, in Minneapolis (see story). "We didn't understand that we had to go all the way down and figure out what chips were in a Model 3 pump, which were different than in the Model 3s that we bought the next year."
ROAD TRIP: PC Week Labs Advanced Technology Analyst Peter Coffee (left) and PC Week Corporate Partner Bruce Brorson took their Y2K expertise on the road.
At Environments, the biggest problem for Forstrom is an Italian-made programmable cutting tool. "We keep on asking if we have a concern. Their flat answer is, 'No, and if you don't believe us, shut it off and try it.' There are no visible date issues, but the software is DOS-based."
Desktop PCs, with their varied user-developed applications, might seem a hotbed of costly Y2K readiness problems, but that hasn't been the experience of successful Y2K warriors. "Most desktop systems are running either standard productivity tools or internally developed distributed systems," said Patrick Davitt, secretary of the Year 2000 Executive Coordinating Committee for the Mayo Foundation, operator of the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester. That makes desktop Y2K problems relatively easy to find and fix, Davitt said.
3M's Cripe concurs. "The personal applications are marginal or less than marginal," she said.
Moreover, Cripe is not impressed with the cost-effectiveness of automated tools for seeking out desktop Y2K problems. "The functionality that they perform, we can write that ourselves," she said. "We have a home-grown tool that will be scanning our desktops."
If anything, the cost and manageability of corporate desktop computing may benefit from Y2K efforts. "One of our redesign processes identified a significant cost-savings opportunity if we could standardize the desktop," said Allina's MacNally. "Y2K has become the politically correct way of doing that."
Northern States Power Co., in Minneapolis, was able to eliminate more than 500 applications that were found to be redundant or otherwise nonessential (see story). "That housecleaning has been very well-received," said Kenith Ehalt, year 2000 project office director at the utility.
At every site that we visited, we found unique issues that affect specific business segments. In the accompanying profiles of four Twin Cities companies and in our report on a day of training for lawyers facing Y2K litigation, IT managers are likely to find a previously unrecognized problem--or opportunity--to address in the Y2K endgame.
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