UP A CREEK? HERE'S A PADDLE
Year 2000 crunch time has arrived. If your critical business applications aren't fixed and being put through the testing process by now, you're heading for problems. Managers hoping to win the year 2000-compliance game at the buzzer are bound to be disappointed. Even the most promising crunch-time tools and tactics are problematic at best -- not the sort of thing on which anybody wants to bet their business or career.
"If companies are not well under way by now, they will probably find themselves in big trouble," says John O'Brien, consulting manager at Systems Integration Group Inc. in Houston. At this point, O'Brien's best recommendation is aggressive triage: Identify only the most critical systems and fix them as fast as possible, letting everything else slide. For example, fix your sales order entry systems so you can continue to process orders after Jan. 1, 2000. On the other hand, you can leave your decision-support applications for later -- the business will survive if static historical data gets sorted improperly for a while.
In the crunch-time rush, don't forget the upside to the year 2000 problem -- better systems. "I just couldn't justify rewriting all our reports until the Y2K problem," says Chuck Kensicki, director of business management systems at the office of the chancellor of the California State University System in Seal Beach, Calif. His data mart strategy not only ensures that his users will be able to access key data, but also delivers "much better reports than the old green bar," he notes.
For those falling dangerously behind, year 2000 project managers and consultants offer up some crunch-time tactics. Be advised, however: There are no magic solutions. The following tools and tactics may prove helpful, but there are no guarantees. Every crunch time situation is different.
Data Migration Tools
Escape the year 2000 problem altogether by migrating to year 2000- compliant packaged applications. That's a favorite strategy, but you'll need some shortcuts at this late date. Borders Group Inc. in Ann Arbor, Mich., pulled off a switch to PeopleSoft Inc. applications in just 11 months with the help of a data-migration tool from Convoy Corp., which expedited the process of extracting the data from the legacy system and transforming it into year 2000-compliant form, says John Cooper, project manager at Borders. The Convoy data-migration tool trimmed three to four months off the implementation process, he says.
Any good automated data-migration tool can speed up the task. If the organization is ready to start implementing the packaged application today and is willing to accept the package's default configurations, it might pull off a migration in the months remaining. But it will be close.
For anyone else, it's already too late.
Escape to a Hot Site
If your hardware and communications infrastructure rather than your application is creating your year 2000 problem, you can run to a "hot site," where disaster-recovery vendors such as Comdisco Inc. in Rosemont, Ill., offer year 2000-compliant platforms. For most companies, however, the biggest year 2000 problems are buried in the application logic and data, not the hardware or communications infrastructure. "If the code won't work at home, it won't here," warns Allan Graham, senior vice president at Comdisco.
Speed Up Testing
The actual year 2000 code fix is relatively simple and straightforward. It's the testing that's arduous and time-consuming. Preparing and aging the data for test purposes represents a substantial testing bottleneck. Automated data-aging tools can speed the process and lop months of work off the task, but such tools vary widely in performance, consistency and reliability. After testing four automated aging tools, Sage Consulting LLC, a year 2000 consulting firm based in Princeton, N.J., turned to Princeton Softech Inc.'s Ager 2000, which Sage said did best in terms of consistency of results. "With Ager 2000, it takes one-tenth the time to age mainframe data compared to writing it yourself in Cobol," reports Ed Soesman, a consultant at Sage.
There are several data-aging tools available. For example, United Stationers Supply Co. in Des Plaines, Ill., uses TransCentury File Age and TransCentury Date Simulator from Platinum Technology Inc. to prepare data for year 2000 testing. The company completed its year 2000 code corrections around Thanksgiving and is devoting the time remaining to testing the resulting programs and contingency planning, says Bob Niedzwiecki, year 2000 project director. "We're examining our processing schedule for the last business day of 1999 to minimize the risk of any jobs running at midnight."
Testing Alternatives
Complete testing is a big, time-consuming job. With so little time remaining, many companies need to shortcut testing. Those desperate for quick-and-dirty testing can try a dipstick test, which is a way to avoid comprehensive testing, explains year 2000 consultant Gregory Morris, CEO of Flat River Technologies LLC in Mount Pleasant, Mich.
Dipstick testing involves using two automated testing tools to review a sample of fixed code. If the sample code tests well with both tools, you can assume the code is pretty solid. Morris uses testing tools from Platinum Technology and Micro Focus Inc. for Cobol code testing. Any two testing tools will do the job, however.
Dipstick testing can work in some cases, but you're taking a real chance, Soesman warns. In situations where there are extensive dependencies among many pieces of code, this approach becomes risky because you're not testing the full code with all of its dependencies. It also requires buying, implementing and learning two tools so you can get, in effect, two views of the same code. That also takes precious time.
Independent Verification and Validation
Independent verification and validation (IV&V) involves using assessment tools to do essentially the same thing as dipstick testing, but IV&V takes place during the assessment phase, when you're scanning code to determine the likelihood of year 2000 problems. If you haven't even started code assessment, a key triage step, IV&V can speed you along.
"It is really like getting a second opinion on your code, and it can save a lot of time," says Steve Frycki, managing director of year 2000 services at DMR Consulting Group Inc.in Edison, N.J. IV&V saves time because it can help you rule out code that's unlikely to cause problems, allowing you to concentrate efforts on known problem code in the remaining time. Of course, you still must fix code that shows up badly in the dual assessment. Also, the results aren't foolproof -- bad code can slip through.
Most leading assessment and testing tool vendors offer IV&V products. However, the tools were intended not to be a shortcut for the initial code assessment process but a final check once all the fixes were completed and tested. "IV&V is really part of litigation-proofing, the final step in the Y2K process," Morris says.
Ensuring Access to Key Data
If there's no way to save your applications, you at least can ensure continued access to critical data while programmers madly scramble to fix the code -- at least that's the logic behind the data mart strategy promoted by Brio Technology Inc. The plan calls for moving critical data into a year 2000-compliant database, such as an Oracle Corp. product. In the data-transfer process, automated migration tools easily can expand two-digit dates to four digits.
Then, by using whatever year 2000-compliant front-end tool the organization prefers, end users can continue to access critical data -- even if the usual applications and mainframe data reports are experiencing problems.
The California State University System adopted that approach for its financial reporting systems, which serve 23 college campuses. It built a 12G-byte data mart on an Oracle database and adopted Brio tools for front-end access instead of rewriting 400 to 500 non-year 2000- compliant mainframe reporting programs, Kensicki says.
Kensicki installed an Oracle database on the systemwide extranet. The legacy data automatically is converted to the four-digit date format as it's loaded into Oracle. Kensicki's team quickly set up reports in Brio, and end users create their own reports, further speeding the process. This approach freed Kensicki's programmers to go back to work on the mainframe application and date logic. "If we had to do it all on the mainframe, we'd still be at it," he says.
Although the data mart approach -- using Brio or other front-end data access tools such as those from Cognos Inc. and Business Objects S.A. -- sounds attractive, it has its limitations. First, it solves only the reporting problem -- it does nothing about updates and transactions. For year 2000 purposes, it buys you only as much time as you need to function without processing new transactions, although a larger benefit in terms of better reporting transcends the year 2000 problem.
Second, setting up a data mart isn't trivial. "This is a smart tactic if you can do it, but it is really for the chosen few," says Russ Kelly, a year 2000 consultant in Seneca, S.C. Data marts, he points out, are neither inexpensive nor easy to build. If you're starting from scratch, you need to buy and install the database, data extraction and transfer tools and the front-end tool. You will have to determine if the benefits are worth diverting money and time from your primary year 2000 repair effort.
With year 2000-compliant PCs available for less than $1,000, it makes sense to replace problem PCs. However, "we have clients with older PCs that they just can't replace due to the cost involved," says Jason Mitchell, a senior systems engineer at Kiefer Confanti and Co., an accounting and consulting firm in St. Louis.
To solve the problem of old PCs, Mitchell recommends PCFix 2000 from The About Time Group in Atlanta. Once installed, the tool masks any year 2000 problems with the hardware and BIOS every time the machine is booted.
Memory Hogs
There are numerous tools that fix PCs by masking year 2000 problems in the hardware or BIOS, but many of the tools are based on terminate-andstay -resident (TSR) programs and thus consume memory, which is in short supply on the older PCs most likely to need this type of fix.
PCFix 2000, Mitchell reports, doesn't consume system resources the way TSR-based fixes do. Mitchell says the network-downloadable PCFix allowed him to make a 30-user LAN year 2000-compliant in two hours. The tool doesn't do anything with PC applications or data that may suffer year 2000 glitches and isn't recommended as a long-term solution. "But when you're under budget and time constraints, it really works," Mitchell says.
There also are desktop utilities that fix PCs, but they typically have to be implemented one PC at a time. If you're looking at a few thousand -- or even a few hundred -- legacy PCs in need of a fix, you have a lot of work to do in the short time ahead.