InformationWeek

August 9, 1999

Benchmarks:
Applications To The Nines

The 9/9/99 date-field test is only a month away. Will your applications pass?

Janis L. Gogan emember that heartthrob song "See You in September"? Sweethearts, forced to part in June, hope to rekindle the flame at summer's end. The song has always evoked sweet memories, but for some the phrase now brings trepidation.

Why? Here's one reason: If you depend on a global positioning system receiver, you might get lost Aug. 22, when many older GPS receivers will reset themselves (the GPS uses a 20-year cycle, and Aug. 21-22 will mark the first 20-year rollover). If your receiver doesn't work, it may be difficult to locate you in your boat or out in the woods. (Concerned? See the U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center site.)

This September also brings the dreaded 9/9/99. For those of us in North America, this date will mark an important test of our electric utilities' year 2000 readiness. On Sept. 8 and 9, the North American Electric Reliability Council will conduct an extensive drill of its ability to communicate within and across agencies over telecommunications channels as part of its year 2000 preparedness. From reviewing its plans at www.nerc.com/~y2k/ drills.html, I'm pleased to see a serious attempt to prepare for various Y2K-related scenarios.

If all goes well in this drill, the electric utilities can pat themselves on the back; if not, they may be tempted to blame "the nines."

Most software applications would code Sept. 9 as 09/09, which is not problematic, but some users in the past did input 9/9/99 into year fields (with no leading 0) to indicate an unknown or unresolved date. That's a case of reasonable software working on bad data that could cause flaky results this Sept. 9.

Did your year 2000 project plans consider 9/9/99 in the analysis, remediation, and testing phases? Think you can rest easy because you don't have decrepit legacy systems, and your users would never put nines in date fields? Keep in mind that some Unix applications will experience problems two years from now, on Sept. 8, 2001, which Unix represents internally as 999,999,999.

Here are a few suggestions for your to-do list before September:

Did your year 2000 team look for 9/9/99 when it analyzed date values? The answer to this question should be "yes," if you claim to adhere to the British Standards Institution's definition of "Year 2000 Conformity" (many companies do reference this as their standard). The institution's document DISC PD2000-1:1998, found at www.bsi.org.uk, contains Rule 3.2.5: "No equipment or product shall use particular date values for special meaning; e.g., `99' to signify `no end value' or `end of file' … unless the values in question lie outside its possible date range."

Ask for evidence that remediated applications were tested against a 9/9/99 scenario. If not, date-sensitive applications that were previously certified as compliant may need to undergo further remediation and testing.

See if your organization has a contingency plan for 9/9/99. You may have no good way to predict whether or where this problem will crop up, but you should know which applications are critical and which can withstand downtimes of an hour, a day, or even a week. Have a few extra troubleshooters on call, ready to help out where needed. For critical applications, double-check your disaster-recovery plan. Be prepared to invoke manual processing and manual verification, if necessary.

Assign someone to document everything that happens on 9/9/99, so you can learn from the experience--and apply those insights to your Y2K contingency plans.

Taking these steps should help make sure that you still see your critical applications in September--and a long time thereafter.

Janis L. Gogan, a professor at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., consults and conducts research on emerging IT issues and management practices. She can be reached at jgogan@bentley.edu.

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