Seven work plans for year-2000 upgrade projects

T he Millenium Horse is a virus hacker's best dream (and our worst nightmare). It is absolutely everywhere. It is " polymorphic, " having a nearly infinite variety of structures and behaviors, and in a nanosecond it can destroy your data, your busi-ness—and perhaps your life. It is worse than any virus or bug. If you had a bug, you'd get user complaints about wrong outcomes , quickly helping to identify the business function, the program , and eventually the code page to fix. If you had a virus, you'd apply your antivirus software and in extreme cases, down-load a database backup before restarting. There are thousands of viruses, placed by programmers whose hearts are not in the right place. But there are many millions of Millenium Horses, all placed there by good-hearted programmers who were absolutely sure their humble code (including date logic) would be replaced entirely some time during that era called the Cold War. Today there are no Soviet republics but many six-digit dates. What to do? Pray the little Slobbovias take it upon themelves to disconnect their nuclear missile launchers, run the computer dates forward, and see what happens. Here at home, make a plan. Seasoned IS managers know there's no such thing as a perfect project plan. That's why any plan with bite-sized milestones—and containing both an intelligent outlook and adequate coverage— will succeed. Unfortunately, there's a dearth of planning literature in this field. A project plan—subject to ongoing revision—will likely succeed if prepared by a senior practitioner who has already done Y2K twice before, or based on a unified approach gleaned from at least three different detailed sources. There are seven main approaches to the Y2K software upgrade task. Outsourcing is not one of them, and if you outsource you'll still need to choose the approach. If you can only name two, you'll have made real decisions about the other five. Deciding not to decide is a decision: 1. Prune the business 2. Wait 3. Replace the application by a purchase or new build 4. Expand YY year fields to YYYY 5. " Intelligent " digits, other encoding 6. Date window(s) 7. Date-shift (encapsulate) code or data Once your orange systems are made Y2K-compliant by one of these methods—if your green ones aren't yet okay—you'll need to " bridge " from one application to another by using intermediate files or other techniques. When you …