Time bomb! - Year 2000 transition problem - Industry Trend or Event - Cover Story

Software Magazine, March, 1997 by Patrick L. Porter, Deborah Radcliff

If the conversion efforts stay on schedule, testing should begin in 1998. Again, Cole is turning to Computer Associates and has chosen its Verify testing tool to help automate this process.

Prenger and Cole praise the backing of a Year 2000 Steering Committee made up of the CEO, COO, senior vice presidents and a physician management team with oversight for IT. "I've been fortunate to have my superiors and peers, along with a large number of physicians, involved with the strategic process," says Prenger, adding that educating and informing management and executives is key to any Year 2000 effort.

It also doesn't hurt that Prenger has 14 in-house Cobol programmers, especially as the conversion effort comes to a boil later this year. However, this poses another challenge. Says Prenger, "Every day, our programmers are being recruited to go out and read Cobol."

Electronics

Hughes' Main Target: Home- grown Engineering Software

Three years ago, Jim Woods, CIO for Hughes Electronics Corp., El Segundo, Calif., took a serious look at the structure of the 85,000 employee, defense and telecommunications company and quickly realized that the only way to solve his Year 2000 problem was to get help. "I went to the office of the Chairman and six company presidents and said, 'I've broken the problem into three pieces. I need some help,'" says Woods. Dividing the task into manageable chunks seemed the only way to pull off a Year 2000 conversion that would sweep across 350 buildings and five autonomous divisions --while facing a June spin off.

Based in Los Angeles, the $16 billion Hughes Electronics, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors Corp., is actually five companies in one: Hughes Aircraft Co., Washington, D.C.; Delco Electronics Corp., Kokomo, Ind.; Hughes Telecommunications and Space Co., El Segundo, Calif.; DirecTV, El Segundo, Calif.; and Hughes Network Systems Inc., Germantown, Md. By mid-year Hughes Aircraft will spin-off from Hughes Electronics and merge with Raytheon Co.

Hughes must tackle a wide array of potential date-field failures. They loom for any piece of manufactured equipment that relies on software or firmware that might contain a two-digit date code, including elevators, manufacturing equipment, heating and ventilation systems and security devices. Every product must be made Year 2000-compliant. To simplify matters, Woods divided the effort between Information Systems and Facilities/Manufacturing.

"Although there are not a lot of legacy Cobol programs in our facilities and manufacturing processes, there are building control systems and equipment embedded in production tools such as inline test equipment and wafer fabrication areas," explains Woods. "We also sell satellite services, some of which aren't compliant. We've also got to go through some of our ground stations and network switching for packets and see if they are compliant. We have a significant amount of legacy systems and infrastructure in IS that are non-Year 2000-compliant. If we fail to fix these, our company's operations will not carry forward."