|
Due to “Prior Proper Planning,” the
College’s Y2K Team is looking forward to a quiet New
Year’s Day.
By Margaret LeRoux
 Predictions
of catastrophes at the approach of the millennium may be
popular with doomsday proponents, but on the campus of Holy
Cross there
is scarcely a furrowed brow among members of the Resolution
2000 Working Group.
Although charged with the awesome responsibility
of “taking all reasonable
steps to assure that everything functions normally when the millennium clock
turns,” the six members of the team, who have been meeting monthly for
the past two years, exude quiet confidence. With five months to go before the
turn of the century, they have already solved many potential Y2K problems by
applying patches and rewriting lines of code. They have inventoried all the
College’s
computers, software and applications; testing of major components to verify
that they are Y2K compliant is almost completed.
The Resolution 2000 Working Group, headed by Heikki Paadre,
information technology services assistant director for production
and network operations, represents
a cross section of the College. Members of the group include: Joan Champagne,
purchasing manager; Dick McFadden, assistant director for operations, physical
plant; Lisa Nestor, senior lab supervisor, chemistry department; Ken Scott,
academic support specialist, information technology services; and Bob Willis,
manager,
dining services business systems.
“During our meetings we’ve been doing a lot of troubleshooting,” explains
Nestor. “Recently we’ve added contingency planning.” “We know what we would have to do in the first 24, 48 and 72 hours if a
crisis occurs,” Paadre says.
Even though the entire campus community has come to rely on computers, the
contingency planning process has also underscored the ability of many departments
to function — though
not easily — without them. For example, Champagne points out that the purchasing
department could buy chairs without a computerized order form; Willis notes that
the dining service’s menus, currently on computer screens, can be hand
printed, and the debit cards for meals temporarily replaced by cash.
Even though the College’s computers will be fully Y2K compliant, the
campus could be affected by computer problems beyond its control, come Jan.
1, 2000.
Despite the best efforts of the Resolution 2000 Working Group, the smooth operations
of the College would be affected if there were computer crashes in banks where
faculty paychecks are direct deposited, in HMOs or insurance companies handling
their health benefits, or in the pension plans where their retirement funds
are invested.
“There are all these tentacles linking the College to the world,” acknowledges
Paadre. “We can’t test everybody’s systems.” Hence,
the importance of contingency plans.
When the Resolution 2000 Working Group convened in May
1997 they began collecting Y2K compliance statements from
manufacturers of the computer,
software, alarm
and electronic systems used by the College. Paadre took the process
a step further by actually testing compliance. In his computer
laboratory
in the
basement of
Fenwick Hall, Paadre created a model of the College’s computer system
and tested it by pushing the internal clock to Dec. 31, 1999. Just as he expected,
the system converted without a hitch. Paadre then took the model on a longer
test ride, successfully overcoming the first year 2000 challenge, the leap
year
date shift from Feb. 29 to March 1, and the rollover on Dec. 31, to 2001. Once
again, the system performed without a problem.
“The advantage to this kind of testing is that it puts none of the students,
faculty, staff, or their equipment at risk,” Paadre explains.
When the real date switch occurs, however, he’d prefer to be even more
cautious.
“To be on the safe side, I’d like to shut down the entire system
on Dec. 31,” Paadre says. “Then, on Jan. 1, 2, or 3, I’d
like to manually start up each system separately.”
Shutting down the entire campus computer system would not
be as drastic as it sounds. New Year’s Eve is on a Friday; because of the Christmas break,
the College will be operating with only a skeleton staff. Classes don’t
start again until Jan. 17, which gives the Working Group more
than two weeks to deal with any potential problems, and if necessary,
execute existing contingency
plans.
According to McFadden, his primary concern is any major
interruption to the fuel oil supply for the campus heating
system. “
If this were to occur,” he says, “since the students
won’t
be on campus at the time, we would respond by reducing our
heating to occupied buildings only. This would allow us to
maintain service for three-to-four days.
If the interruption persisted beyond that time frame, we could
switch to natural gas as a back-up fuel since our boilers have
dual capacity.”
On a sunny Friday in late spring, potential computer problems
at the end of the year seem distant indeed. As students lounge
on the grass, chatting about vacation plans, Paadre is gearing
up for a busy summer. By the time students return in the
fall, he will have completed testing the College’s
computer systems for Y2K compliance. Also, during the summer,
two outdated computer systems that handle financial records
and student services will be replaced with new systems that
are Y2K compliant.
Over at the dining services, Willis, too, notes that the
summer break will be
far from leisurely. “It’s going to be a challenge getting everything
in place before classes start again in the fall,” he says. That means dismantling
the old system, installing new servers and computer terminals at the points of
sale, and getting a new system of stored-value cards into place.
At the same time Paadre is troubleshooting the College’s computer network,
Scott is tracking Y2K compliance and potential problems in the 850 or so personal
computers used by faculty and staff, as well as those in the common lab areas.
Students are responsible for their own PCs, but they can get assistance from
the information technology staff. There’s even a special e-mail account
to handle Y2K concerns: hcy2k@holycross.edu.
Scott ticks off a list of computer hardware — IBM,
Dell, Acer Pentium, and Macintosh — that have been
tested and found to be compliant. “
Some older machines are not,” he adds. “The plan is to replace
them all with new computers that are compliant.”
Computer software is also being tested; Macintosh and Novell
are Y2K compliant, while Windows 95 needs patches. The most
popular applications — Excel,
for example, are compliant, but it’s possible for users to customize them
so that they are not.
“We’ve purchased software to analyze Access database and Excel spreadsheet
data for compliance,” Scott says. “Every time a two digit year comes
up, it can be problematic. However, the vast majority of computer users store
dates as information, and are not using dates for calculation.”
The classic problem with two-digit dates surfaced in the
student information system back in 1996 when Paadre discovered
a computer-generated letter
welcoming the class of 1900.
“The data in the letter was correct, the student names were correct, it
was just a matter of changing the line of code so that the year 2000 could be
expressed,” he explains.
Nestor, the academic representative on the working group,
cites another example. “The workhorses of our chemistry
laboratories are the UV visible spectrophotometers, which
run with microprocessors on board,” she explains. Spectrophotometers
are used to measure concentrations of chemicals by reading their
ability to absorb light at ultraviolet or visible wavelengths.
Although they display the date along
with the data, it’s not something that affects the calculations
made by the instruments. “In chemistry, as in other departments,
we’ve compiled inventories
of equipment and spent a lot of time going to Web sites to find
out if it’s
Y2K compliant,” Nestor adds.
Pencils and paper, or maybe even solar calculators could
be computer substitutes in the contingency plans of the College’s
purchasing department. “We could go back to a paper-based
system if the computers are down,” acknowledges
Joan Champagne, purchasing manager. “We have contracts
with most of our major vendors and they would accept a verbal
order.”
Champagne has already gotten verification from vendors
that they are Y2K compliant. However, most of the buying
for the
academic
year ahead
will
be done during
the summer. “Late December and early January are slow
periods for purchasing,” Champagne
says, “The volume at that time of year is way down.”
Timing then, is an added benefit to the efforts of the
Resolution 2000 Working Group. Considering the volume of
work team members
will have
completed by
the end of the year, and barring any unexpected complications,
Paadre does not
expect to spend New Year’s Eve in the computer laboratory. “I’m very
thankful to the team, my staff, and the entire ITS department,” he says. “Everyone
has worked together on this problem.”
Scott, a ’67 graduate of Holy Cross, quotes one of his Jesuit professors: “It’s
unwise to speak in absolutes,” he says, “but given the time we’ve
spent and research we’ve done on potential Y2K problems, I’d
be surprised if anything untoward happens.”
Margaret LeRoux is a free-lance journalist from Worcester.
|
