September 27, 1999
Y2K: Three months and counting
By Jim Burns
In the wee hours of a Saturday morning about three months from today, as people around the world are ushering in the first day of 2000, a small corps of UCSC workers will spend the first few hours of the New Year on campus...looking for bugs.
Not the multilegged variety, but for signs of the much discussed "Y2K (or Millennium) Bug."
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Pat LeCuyer, acting assistant vice chancellor for Communications and Technology Services (CATS), doesn't expect that the corps of staff members will uncover major power or system failures during their early-morning campus checkup on January 1. But with the winter quarter starting on Monday, January 3, no one wants to take any chances.
"My concern is not so much that we will sustain failures to our mission-critical computer systems," LeCuyer said. "We feel like we're going to be in good shape in terms of the central systems like the Student Information System (SIS) and Financial Information System (FIS)."
"My concern is that we will have so little time before our students return to campus for the winter quarter to get a Y2K-related failure fixed should we be surprised by one," he said.
At UCSC and elsewhere, the primary Y2K exposure comes from the decades-old industry standard of using two instead of four digits for year representation within computer programs, files, databases, and logic boards. For example, the year 1999 is represented by "99." The worry, however, has been that on January 1, 2000, the computer-represented date of 01/01/00 might be interpreted as January 1, 1900, causing computer programs that perform arithmetic operations, comparisons, or sorting of date fields to yield incorrect results.
To avoid such problems, UCSC staff has been identifying and mitigating Y2K risks for more than two years. CATS staff, for example, have checked hundreds of thousands of lines of computer code driving operating systems, applications, and files--and made necessary corrections.
LeCuyer has also chaired a campuswide Y2K Task Force, which has worked with 24 Y2K coordinators from across the campus to assess the campus's overall Y2K readiness. The results of that assessment: "We've inventoried almost 900 central and department-level systems--everything from major systems like SIS and FIS that serve the entire campus to the smaller control systems that power fire alarms and elevators in specific buildings," LeCuyer said. "More than 98 percent of all of our central systems and 90 percent of all systems are already Y2K compliant. And we anticipate that all of the others will be compliant by the end of the calendar year."
Just to be on the safe side, however, campus units that have identified life-support or mission-critical systems with any Y2K exposure have been asked to develop contingency plans that could be implemented on a moment's notice in the first days of January.
Registrar Cecilia Rodriguez heads just such a unit. And while she is confident that SIS will be fully functional, enabling the campus to handle the volume of enrollment-related tasks that are completed at the beginning of each quarter, she's taking no chances. Rodriguez's staff is busy devising a process to handle those tasks the old-fashioned way: by paper.
The Public Information Office, working with the Task Force, has established a Y2K Web site (y2k.ucsc.edu) with links to Task Force documents and CATS' many Web pages on Y2K mitigation. The y2k.ucsc.edu Web page will provide current information on UCSC's Y2K status between now and the New Year--and in the critical hours, days, and weeks that follow.
