InformationWeek

February 15, 1999

The Desktop: A Y2K Tangle

Applications developed by end users pose special problems

By Bruce Caldwell

s year 2000 project managers wrap up work on crucial mainframe and client-server systems, they're turning their attention to the widely scattered and diverse domain of the desktop. In this domain, though, the tools available for code remediation only go so far.

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Year 2000 problems take on unique characteristics at the desktop level. Beyond the complex and myriad issues involved with PC hardware and packaged desktop applications, end users have generated countless spreadsheet and database applications that are confined to their individual PCs. Centralized monitors and controls don't touch them; documentation and standards are virtually nil. The business rationale for the existence of spreadsheets and databases resides with individual employees. "It doesn't get any hairier than this," says Greg Nelson, manager of desktop applications support at Frank Russell Co., an adviser to institutional investors that's grappling with Y2K desktop compliance.

Most companies underestimate how critical desktop applications are to business processes, says James Duggan, an analyst at Gartner Group Inc. In a typical organization, each user has created between one and 10 desktop applications, Gartner Group says, and the year 2000 remediation costs to fix these applications will range between $160 and $700 per user. Most of these applications are spreadsheets, but there are also database applications, systems written in Visual Basic or Lotuscript, user-maintained intranet sites, and more.

Organizations are finding that third-party tools are helpful in inventorying and assessing year 2000 problems in the desktop environment, but there's more to be done. End users must decide which applications are critical to their operations, then determine which apps are so complex that only IT professionals can make the necessary year 2000 repairs, and which they can fix themselves. To carry out these tasks, substantial end-user education and training are necessary. Afterward, the establishment of policies on end-user application development and usage is essential to prevent new year 2000 problems from being introduced into the desktop environment.

The difficulties involved in establishing and maintaining year 2000 readiness in the desktop environment are part of the price businesses pay for the value received from desktop applications, says Jeff Demmon, a consultant working as the year 2000 desktop program manager at Frank Russell. "Spreadsheets and databases are huge productivity tools," he says, "but a cost of these tools is that you can't distribute all the discipline and practices around the company that you have in central IT."

Frank Russell used OnMark 2000, a suite of Y2K desktop-compliance tools from Viasoft Inc., to inventory and assess applications on the 1,500 PCs at the company's Tacoma, Wash., headquarters and other offices throughout the world. Normal technology refreshment under the company's leasing agreement with Compaq should address all hardware compliance issues, Nelson says, and Novadigm Inc.'s Enterprise Desktop Manager has just been implemented to help distribute compliant versions of standard packaged desktop software throughout the enterprise.

The biggest problem? The desktop inventory and assessment turned up almost 75,000 Excel spreadsheets and about 500 Microsoft Access databases, not including other legacy spreadsheets and databases. "Our first look at the number of files scared us to death," says Demmon. Since then, the numbers have become more manageable by weeding out duplicate and nonessential files and identifying several thousand as most critical to the business units. Some 150 applications have been judged so complex that Frank Russell has handed them over to outsourcer Complete Business Solutions Inc. for remediation in a nonproduction environment.

Going forward, Frank Russell's business units are receiving training seminars on date fields and proper formatting and scripting practices. They also have access to an intranet site with tips and best-practices information for carrying out some of the remediation work themselves. By June, all critical year 2000 work should be complete, leaving the rest of the year for testing and contingency planning. Noncritical spreadsheets and databases with minor year 2000 issues will be fixed later, replaced, or removed.

User-developed files and applications aren't the only components of the desktop environment involved in year 2000 projects. The real-time and system clocks and BIOS that manage time and dates for PCs must be checked and patched where necessary. Operating systems must also be upgraded or patched to achieve year 2000 compliance. Automated and centralized tools are available from a host of vendors to help with all these tasks.

That wasn't the case less than a year ago. Viasoft, for example, didn't launch OnMark 2000 until last spring, followed by Platinum Technology Inc.'s Web-based TransCentury Office. These tools help inventory, assess, and remediate year 2000 problems in desktop applications. And it was only months ago that tools for comprehensively testing internal PC clocks began hitting the market, beginning with About Time Group Inc.'s PCfix 2000.

Not Many Takers
But despite the recent availability of these tools, there aren't many companies using them. Kazim Isfahani, an industry analyst at Giga Information Group, says that after talking to desktop tool vendors, it appears that only about 500 companies are actively working on desktop projects. "Desktop has been on the back burner," Isfahani says, because of the focus on crucial applications that reside on mainframe and client-server systems. That has to change, he adds, as this is the last year for year 2000 remediation.

The University of Arizona is well aware of this situation. The college recently licensed 10,000 copies of TransCentury Office 2.0, which was made generally available on Feb. 1. In addition to inventorying and prioritizing desktop applications, says Paul Christian, a support systems analyst at the university, TransCentury has the added benefit of automatically adjusting dates for year 2000 compliance, even at the macro level of spreadsheets. Network managers and departmental administrators are being trained to assist end users, Christian says.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is also grappling with Y2K desktop compliance. "Our desktop project was harder than we anticipated," says Charles Gerhards, Pennsylvania's deputy secretary for IT and year 2000 project manager. The challenge wasn't so much a technical one as a project-management one: Pennsylvania had to reach out to end users of 40,000 PCs and track hundreds of concurrent tasks.

Pennsylvania's inventory and assessment of its PC hardware found 9,000 PCs were noncompliant. While most of the noncompliant PCs were made before 1997, some were made later than that, and were supposed to be year 2000 compliant, Gerhards says, but weren't.

Pennsylvania checked its PCs using BIOS-testing software from the National Software Testing Lab (owned by CMP Media Inc., parent company of InformationWeek). Its 100 most critical PC applications were submitted to product research firm Datapro Information Services Group for independent analysis, Gerhards says. Compliance for applications not included in the top 100 is the responsibility of the state agencies that want those applications, he adds. About 1,000 PCs have been replaced, another 2,000 have been fixed with BIOS patches from PC vendors, and 1,000 will be patched. The rest are low-priority PCs that will be manually reset or patched later.

The application inventory and analysis also found many packaged software products in need of upgrades for compliance, Gerhards says. An enterprise licensing agreement signed last June with Microsoft will take care of many of those products. The agreement will standardize Pennsylvania's PCs on Microsoft Windows, Office, and Exchange.

The next big push, Gerhards says, is an education campaign to inform end users about the year 2000 and applications, including spreadsheets and databases, that they develop themselves. A video is under development to help spread the word. Pennsylvania researched year 2000 desktop tools, Gerhards says, but concluded that most are so complex that "end users would need a Ph.D. to figure them out." Other tools weren't capable of fixing all the problems. "If we just gave tools to the end users, the software would probably be in worse shape than before," he says.

Lay The Blame
Some companies have tackled their desktops later rather than sooner because many packaged software vendors didn't bring out year 2000-compliant products or patches until late last year, pushing testing, validation, and deployment into this year. AT&T faced this dilemma. The company, which is spending about $700 million on its year 2000 project, had remediated only 4% of its PCs as of November, but by January had certified that work was complete on 40%. AT&T expects to finish compliance work on its desktop environment by the middle of this year, says John Pasqua, VP of year 2000 compliance at AT&T.

Software vendor footdragging has also led to lawsuits. Nearly every year 2000 lawsuit filed to date has involved a desktop software product whose customers faced uncertain delivery dates for year 2000 compliance patches and/or the need for low-cost or free patches instead of expensive upgrades.

In December, for example, Medical Manager Inc. agreed to pay $1.4 million in attorney fees, free upgrades, and reimbursements to customers that had upgraded to the year 2000-compliant version of its physician practice-management software. And last month, accounting software vendor RealWorld Corp. agreed to provide free upgrades that may cost the company as much as $50 million.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has drawn the most flak, having first assured customers there were no year 2000 issues with its desktop software--then slowly acknowledging there were "minor issues." It wasn't until last month that Microsoft launched an aggressive program involving tools and consultants to help customers combat the year 2000 problem on the desktop.

Compounding the desktop problem is the fact that, as with mainframe computers, old applications haven't gone away as quickly as expected. Some of the customers that sued RealWorld, for example, are using versions of DOS-based RealWorld Classic Accounting software that were released as long ago as 1990. For many small companies clinging to older versions of desktop software, upgrading to year 2000-compliant versions often means hardware upgrades will be required as well, dramatically increasing total compliance costs.

As daunting as year 2000 desktop compliance seems, it's not all bad news. The level of business understanding and centralized management of the desktop environment will be substantially increased through the inventory and assessment phases of the project. Standardization of hardware and software as part of the compliance effort will ease maintenance and support requirements and lower costs through volume purchasing. And end users should emerge with a higher awareness of, and appreciation for, the disciplines and practices that can help them avoid trouble in the future.

Illustration by Barton Stabler