Svoboda's Home and Small Business Review
The Computer Contrarian
Wm. R. Stocking
July, 1998

Looming 2000 Computer Doom? Part II

Year 2000 - Will You be Ready? Will your city be ready? Will your electric company be ready? In the month since the last article, we have accumulated over 3000 documents on year 2000 computer matters. The scope of the century change problem is far bigger than I had originally imagined: Not only do we have to worry about the hardware clocks in our PC's and mainframes, but there are many hidden "clocks" in other kinds of devices. For example, there are clocks that control the stop light systems on our city streets and there are clocks to measure and schedule service cycles in objects such as copy machines and elevators!

The large scale 2000 problems that can and will affect essential infrastructure such as electric, communication, water, etc. are being dwelt with, albeit not fast enough in many cases. Those things we will talk about at a later date when we deal with how to evaluate and prepare for problems outside of your immediate control. In this article we will attempt to discuss only the steps you need to take to make your business "safe" during and after the change over.

YOUR 2000 PLAN

Here are basic steps needed by most businesses:

TRIAGE - Decide what computer connected operations are most necessary to the functioning of daily business. For most businesses this is the accounting system. If it doesn't function, then everything in the business will likely grind to a halt. "We can go back to doing things manually" is really not an option even though I have had several business people say that to me. Often, managers are so far removed from daily operations that they don't realize that most of their employees were in grade school when the company was running on a manual system and wouldn't have the slightest idea on how to do the job manually!

FIX HARDWARE - If your business runs on PC's or on a PC network, then the first order of the day is to evaluate hardware and "fix" what can be fixed for 2000 date compliance and replace what cannot.

There are a number of programs available for downloading from the internet that can evaluate the status of your PC's RTC, (Real Time Cock), and BIOS. There are even programs that will "fix" the situation. Some of these are shareware and some are limited in what they will do, but it's safe to say that for around $50 per machine for the software the clock problem can be taken care of. (There are some limited cases when the softwae fix is not enough - the bios will need to be totally replaced.) This is one time that I think it really pays to make sure you send in the fee for the shareware or actually buy a retail version of the 2000 fix program in question. For information on where to find and link to sites of software vendors that provide Y2K RTC fixes visit our 2000 site:

http://www.firstbiz.com/2000

By the way, if your business is on a network don't think that just because you should be getting the date information at each workstation from the network server that you can neglect fixing the clocks in the individual workstations; you can't for a number of reasons. Each workstation should be 2000 compliant. For example, sometimes individual users need to continue working locally when the network is "down." And, there are instances when workstations aren't set-up properly or contain a hardware anomality such that programs will obtain date information locally when they really should be getting it from the main file server. NEWER HARDWARE - Just because a PC was purchased in the last couple of years, don't assume it is doing the job right. Test ALL machines!

INVENTORY OFF THE SHELF SOFTWARE - You really need to go to every PC in you facility and make a list of all programs on each machine. If you are in a Windows program, you can usually pull down the "Help" menu and look under "About" to find out the version number of the program. That information is vital to discovering what needs fixing.

Next, you should go to the web site of each software vendor and find the 2000 compliance status of their software. There will be some programs that will need to be up-graded to newer versions to become compliant. Here again, don't think that just because a program is only a year or two old it is necessarily "OK," or that an older program is unusuable. If you visit our 2000 site, we can give you links to other sites that contain lists of compliant and non-compliant software. Just remember that "compliance" is a complicated issue: Some programs might function properly and yet the the display of a date such as Janurary 3rd, 2000 might look like: "01/03/00." Some evaluations might call that "uncompliant" because the visible date field doesn't expand to a full 10 digits even if dates are handled properly internally.

If you don't have Internet access, try calling the vendor and requesting faxed 2000 compliance information. The more responsible software vendors are sending out notices via the US mails on necessary software updating. Don't be surprised if you get wishy-washy responses from some vendors. That means that company lawyers have started editing all outgoing statements about the issue!

IN-HOUSE SOFTWARE - Every time an employee puts together a spreadsheet there is an opportunity to create an in-house tool that is non-compliant. Example: If a column representing years uses only two digits to represent the year it will not compute properly when trying to do calculations involving the next century. If the spreadsheet is very complicated and uses a lot of macros you could also have problems. Every single spreadsheet critical to your business needs to be examined. If you are talking about very complicated sheets and many dozens of them, there are special tools available to make the job easier.

What we are saying about spreadsheets goes double for in-house database programs and programs you had designed and contracted for from outside sources using database tools such as dBase, Clipper, Foxbase, Access, Paradox, R-Base, Oracle, etc. Many of these programs are going to stop dead the day after December 31, 1999. And, many of the data files produced by these programs will have to be "expanded" to include full ten digit date fields.

If any software vital to your company falls into the above category you must start NOW to see if it can be fixed. If you do not have the "source code" for these programs or the vendor is out of business, you might need to allow time for a totally new program to be written. The need for urgency cannot be overly stressed; it is quite possible that there will be a world wide shortage of programmers before the year's end. 2000 remediation projects are gobbling up programming resources at an alarming rate.

Even if you have a MacIntosh shop, you need to be careful about spreadsheet and database software and data models that have been designed specifically for your company. While the Mac may be a compliant piece of hardware, the custom software you are using might not be!

Remember: time won't just march on at the turn of the century, it will positively trample businesses not prepared for it! Meanwhile, you can get additional 2000 information at our website:

http://www.firstbiz.com/2000

William Stocking is President of First Business Systems, Ltd. an information management consultant to businesses of all sizes. He can be e-mailed at wrs@firstbiz.com. Visit the Web site at http://www.firstbiz.com.