December 13, 1999

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The Brighter Side Of The Y2K Problem
continued...page 4 of 4

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Lessons Learned from Y2K Not Just Another New Year's Eve...

Although Y2K remediation wasn't one of the company's biggest IT projects, Office Depot considered it a significant one. "From the start, we still wanted flawless project management," he says. As third-party involvement required tracking and research efforts, Office Depot decided to limit its reliance on outside IT help.

When it came to Y2K compliance, the company's 6-year-old mainframe was a primary remediation target. Fortunately, the system boasted relatively new apps. Work involved inventory and assessment of every link and tool, including applications and hardware, vendors, facility security, and operating systems.

"We've fixed everything that was deemed critical," Seltzer says. "The one thing we're still dealing with is the vendor community, since many are still working on remedies. But with all the internal stuff, we've been on target and successful."

Atlas Van Lines started early because it had 6,000 mainframe programs to consider, in addition to 450 PCs and a "bunch load" of applications that needed to be checked, says MIS leader Arneson.

The company's 20-person programming staff spent considerable time updating the mainframe, which holds information from which nearly every department draws. The mainframe supports key operations, including shipments, dispatching, claims, revenue accounting, and settlements used to distribute revenue back to Atlas agents.

Arneson says the Y2K work was done during the downtime of the regular IT workflow over four years, so it didn't require a separate budget. He adds that his department had top-management support from the start.

Arneson says Atlas Van Lines' biggest Y2K challenge--testing--came this year, and provided a good lesson for the future. The testing involved partitioning the mainframe and checking every possible business scenario. That required employees to run mock scenarios of work processes. "It's taken longer than we anticipated," he says. "We planned for four to five months, and it's more close to eight months. We really didn't put enough planning into the testing aspect, and it's put a dent in our work efforts this year."

But the experience has beefed up his staff's skills. "Y2K really improved our ability to test, and did help us develop new and better processes," Arneson says.

While he's confident there will be no "showstoppers" come Jan. 1, Arneson--along with most CIOs and IT managers--regrets the price his company has had to pay for Y2K compliance. Says Arneson, "Just think, all the time and labor costs spent on remediating Y2K could have been spent elsewhere."

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