Departments
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Week of 19 March 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 27 |
Feature
Article
Broad-based participation in Y2K effort urged
By Eric McHenry
An informational Web site created to help BU administration, faculty, and staff assist in the University's Y2K effort (www.bu.edu/y2k) displays the time left until the next millennium in days, hours, minutes, and even seconds.
As vice president for information systems and technology, John Porter is responsible both for the Web site and the Y2K effort, and he's acutely aware of the millennium's imminence. He says he needs, in turn, to make the University community aware of what's required to set the stage for a smooth transition.
On February 12, Jon Westling sent out a memo to all University faculty and staff apprising them of the effort and calling upon them for assistance.
"The ultimate deadline," he noted, "cannot be postponed, and we owe it to our students, to our funding agencies, and to our institution to ensure that we continue to function smoothly into 2000 and beyond."
"Many groups," Porter writes in a detailed follow-up letter that will soon be sent out, "including University Information Systems, Physical Plant, and the Year 2000 Task Force, have spent months and even years doing the behind-the-scenes work that needed to be done, and critical testing of this work will continue for some time. We now need to expand the effort across the institution, and this is the point at which there may be actions you need to take."
Porter and his staff have isolated four key areas in which the University community could potentially be affected by the Y2K problem: the University's administrative data systems, distributed computing systems, embedded systems, and outside dependencies.
Modification of the administrative data systems to bring about Y2K compliance is largely complete, Porter says, and UIS, with the help of many user departments, is currently in the process of testing its work. BU had a head start on this conversion, he says, because Application Services Director Maxine Howe recognized the impending Y2K problem back in 1994. Howe says her department has been able to make many of the University's applications Y2K compliant as part of reengineering procedures that would have taken place anyway. Remaining systems, she says, have also been retrofitted.
Distributed computing systems include all personal computers, workstations, and departmental servers that are not part of the central administrative network. Porter urges members of the University community to consult the Web site for instructions pertinent to their particular systems. The University's Year 2000 Task Force has been at work for many months on making distributed systems millennium-proof, he says. Among its tools is semiautomated diagnostic software that can identify potential problems for PCs.
"We just install it on your local server," he says, "and then when you log in, the software scans your machine and takes an inventory. Later, it compares that inventory against its known database of compliance information, which is pretty extensive, and then creates a report: here's something that's known to be compliant; here's something that's known not to be; here's what you have to do. It basically does the legwork."
The term embedded systems encompasses all systems that are not computers but are in some way computer-governed -- "everything from elevators to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning to laboratory instrumentation to security systems," Porter says. "This is the area where there's the most outrageous hype: traffic lights are going to fail, planes are going to fall out of the air. Mr. Coffee won't work."
Inconvenient glitches, Porter says, are a lot more likely than catastrophes. The University has engaged an independent consulting firm to review its embedded systems effort. Large pieces of University equipment such as elevators, climate control systems, and security systems will be taken care of, Porter says, but his staff and consultants cannot feasibly test fax machines, laboratory instruments, and other pieces of small equipment that might have date-dependent components. He encourages members of the University community to survey their office and laboratory equipment, consult appropriate vendors and service providers, and refer to the readiness information available on the Web site.
This problem's last quarter, dependency on others, is for obvious reasons the most difficult to assess and control, Porter says.
"As a large University, we're dependent upon all sorts of vendors," he says, "not necessarily because they provide us with computer equipment or anything related to computers, but because they supply us with something. Maybe it's oil or office supplies or a service. So the question is not, Will their product work in the year 2000? The oil will work fine. The question is, Are they going to be in shape to deliver it, or are their own systems going to fail?"
To preempt problems created by external dependencies, the University will be requesting a Y2K compliance statement from each of the approximately 500 vendors with which it had the most significant business dealings in 1998. Porter plans to post a list of these vendors, along with their responses to the compliance query, on the Web site. He says it will also include a mechanism by which University employees can add the names of vendors "critical to [their] operation" to the list of those designated for contact.
A number of factors are at work in the University's favor as the notorious date draws near, Porter says. One is the additional information and troubleshooting equipment that have become available in recent months.
"Last summer, there wasn't any Y2K information for lots of software products," he says. "It's just easier to deal with some of these things now than it would have been a year or even six months ago."
Another benefit, he says, is the gradual conversion of applications undertaken by UIS beginning in 1994. A third is the academic calendar. On January 1, 2000, he says, "we'll have two weeks before the students come back, which is a real benefit." Simultaneously, he says, the University will have "a larger-than-normal number of staff members present -- physical plant people, information technology and UIS people -- just watching things, making sure that there are no major problems."
There's little risk of the sun failing to come up when the new millennium dawns, Porter says.
"But I certainly think it's reasonable to expect some glitches. The important thing is that there be a broad-based readiness effort," he says. "With the letters and the Web site, we're trying to give people a heads up on it, a feel for the kinds of things they should be looking for and doing."