With David Knott
from London
As you raise your glass to welcome the new century in less than 4 years, the computer at your office may be having the electronic equivalent of a nervous breakdown.
Information technology (IT) specialists warn that when clocks strike midnight Dec. 31, 1999, many computers could either crash or begin to get their sums wrong.
That's because much existing software incorporates dates written in the format MM/DD/YY, in which two digits represent the month, date, and year.
Many programs, particularly those written when the turn of the century was a long way off, will assume that with the new millennium the date moves from 99 to 00.
That will either confuse computers completely or start them counting from 1900. It could disrupt any sector of the oil and gas industry that requires tallies of daily transactions-products marketing, for example.
Big bill
Computer Management Group U.K. Ltd. (CMG), London, figures the cost of checking and changing all affected programs in all industries worldwide could add up to $600 billion.
CMG reckons an initial study for a large company just to check what could be affected would cost as much as $4.5 million. Elaine Eustace, consultant in CMG's Year 2000 unit, said nobody can be sure which software will be affected until it has been checked.
Eustace said, "This means auditing every program in the organization-checking it, making the necessary changes, and testing it. Ideally, one needs a full year's testing to run through a normal business cycle. That means organizations have less than 3 years left to go through this process."
While this may sound like a long time, Eustace said, big organizations could have more than 35,000 programs. It takes 3-7 man-days to test and modify each program at an average cost of 1,000-1,200 ($1,500-1,800).
David Hobbs, also a consultant in the Year 2000 unit, said CMG has worked on this problem for the U.K. downstream division of one major oil company.
"Oil companies are in the same position as every other company," Hobbs said, "but typical oil companies may suffer more than most because they are generally so big and so mature in terms of IT. The more mature they are, the more they are likely to have problems."
Two cures
Hobbs explained there are two main approaches to curing the problem. The first is the long slog and involves changing every program so dates are written using four digits instead of two.
The alternative "sliding window" approach is to rewrite some of the software so the system counts any two digit year from, say, 80 to 99 as in the 1900s and any number less than 80 as in the 2000s range.
"Many vendors have been sliding the window in this way," Hobbs said. "This is not an immensely complex task, but you have to get it right. If you do it wrong, you could end up with things that don't work too well in the next leap year after 2000, which will be 2004."
CMG warns that only a small percentage of organizations are taking the year 2000 seriously: "They haven't got much time, and it's a problem that won't go away. In fact, it gets worse the longer it's left because more work will then have to be done in a shorter time."
Copyright 1996 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
