Project Objectives, Goals and Benefits

Enterprise Servers

Legacy Systems - Tools

Short History/Timeline of the Legacy Conversion

County Outreach

Contingency Planning

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

• Ensure that all systems developed and maintained by Information Technology Department are converted to Y2K compatibility and tested by December 31, 1998.
• Stimulate professional and effective teamwork to coordinate the County Y2K project conversion effort .
• Acquire the appropriate tools to assist the conversion process.
• Assure that all data interfaces with outside entities, government and otherwise are Year 2000 compliant .

PROJECT GOALS FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT:

• Review and convert, where necessary, all enterprise systems to correctly handle all dates for the year 2000 and beyond .
• Enterprise systems are defined as:
• Enterprise server (mainframe computer) applications.
• Computer applications on the County's website.
• Client/server systems built and maintained by Information Technology Department.
• Network resources.

PROJECT GOALS FOR INDIVIDUAL COUNTY DEPARTMENTS:

• Remediation of desktop hardware and software.
• Remediation of custom applications developed or purchased by County departments.
• Facilities and facility systems (alarms, security, etc.)
• Embedded computer chips in other kinds of equipment (medical devices, vehicles, etc.)

PROJECT BENEFITS

• Customer service uninterrupted by the transition to the year 2000 .
• Improved service where that can be achieved as a by-product of conversion .
• Contingency plans in place for systems that are critical .

ENTERPRISE SERVERS

The County has a single enterprise server: an IBM 9672-RB6. "Enterprise server" is the more current term for what many still refer to as a "mainframe" computer. These servers are operating under OS/390, MVS-JES2. They use VTAM, TCP/IP, CICS, DB2, TSO and many other system software products. This equipment and software has been reviewed and will be, compliant by December 1998. Additional testing of the enterprise server complex and operating system software will be conducted in what is called "LPAR Testing" during calendar year 1999. In basic terms, LPAR testing amounts to devoting a separate computer to testing on designated dates within the next century. The enterprise server is the platform on which the County "legacy" application systems are run. Please refer to the next section for more information about legacy systems.

LEGACY SYSTEMS - TOOLS

All of the legacy application systems maintained by the Information Technology Department, (for example Social Services, properties, criminal justice, and administrative applications), will have been analyzed, remediated, tested and returned to production by December 31, 1998. The need for separate audits of the applications, or to use the current marketing term, Independent Verification and Validation (I V & V), and LPAR (or integrated systems testing) will be completed as necessary in 1999. The following sections describe tools that have already been acquired to assist in the Year 2000 conversion efforts.

TRANS-CENTURY DATE ROUTINE

A standard date calculation program was purchased from Trans-Century Systems, a division of Platinum Technology. This professionally designed software provides for flexible and reliable common date calculations and conversions, which include the necessary foundation to prepare for the millennium change to the Year 2000. The software provides standard date related features used by the County's analysts and programmers. In the past, the County has used a variety of "home grown" date related applications. Some were Y2K compatible, some were not. Through the use of a widely accepted commercial product, date routines will be standard throughout the County.

TIC TOC

TicToc, a product of Isogon Corporation, was acquired by the County of 1997 as an addition to our portfolio of development and test tools. TicToc functions between the operating system and an application program to make the program appear to be running on a date other than the current date. Under the direction of the programmer analyst, a test date is passed to TicToc which, in turn, passes the test date to the application program as the "run date." In this manner, for example, an analyst could run a test of a program on December 1, 1998 but make it appear as though it was being run on February 29, 2000 (or any future date.) This is a valuable simulator when working with the millennium date change. However, it is only a simulator for a given program or group of applications programs. It does not exercise Y2K features of computer hardware or systems software.

FILE AID FOR MVS

File Aid for MVS, manufactured by Compuware, was the third and final tool acquired by the County to assist in repair of legacy programs. This product, acquired late in 1997 is used for the following purposes:

• Creation of test data or "aging" of existing test data to contain post Y2K dates.
• Validation of test results, without laboriously manually performing field by field analysis. This is especially useful in comparing the results of records before and after Y2K remediation is applied.

AUTOMATED REMEDIATION MACHINES

Alameda County did not use any of the so-called automated remediation methods of conversion. The County tried three of these automated remediation tools. With an automated remediation tool non-compliant computer code is fed into a large and complex program that is purported to automatically make the computer code Y2K compliant. Although we tested three of these tools exhaustively, we found that in all cases about 1% of the code either was not converted, or was converted incorrectly. What this meant was that our programmers had to look at every line of computer converted code to ascertain that it had been correctly converted, and if it hadn't, to make human corrections. After trying three of the leading "silver-bullet" products, we determined that it would be simpler and more cost effective to convert our four million lines of procedure division code manually in the first place. This is the course of action we followed.

A SHORT HISTORY/TIMELINE OF THE LEGACY CONVERSION:

1. March 1996: All Information Technology programming managers are asked to provide time estimates to convert each of their applications to function into and beyond the year 2000.

2. April 1996: First consolidated spreadsheet prepared for all applications to be converted. Initial estimate by managers and programming teams totals 42 person years work or 94,000 hours.

3. July 1996: Initial Y2K four person team formed. System written by team to identify from the County computer scheduling system every program run in production in the past eighteen months. Work commences on the first of four small pilot projects to learn and document Y2K conversion methodology.

4. September 1996: First consolidated inventory of work to be done produced. This document is attached and entitled: Analysis of Programs in Production. (Requires Acrobat Reader to view.)

This spreadsheet was refined over time and grew to include three types of estimates:

• Refined Project Manager Estimates: After eliminating systems that would not be running after the turn of the century and programs that had not been run in the past eighteen months, the volume of work as estimated by project leaders was reduced to 56,000 hours.
• Lines of Code Estimate: A generally accepted method of Y2K estimating is based on the number of lines of COBOL procedure division code. After counting up all the lines of procedure division code to be converted, we estimated we had 55,000 hours of conversion work to do.
• Frequency of Dates Estimate: Some programs are extremely date manipulation intensive; others are not. After assigning appropriate weighting to the date related fields, we estimated we had 81,000 hours of conversion work to do.
• Overall, our initial analysis indicated we would have to staff to accomplish between 55,000 and 81,000 hours of work by December 31, 1998.

5. November 1996: First three pilot application conversions completed. Decision reached to remediate through the use of "windowing" techniques wherever possible as opposed to file expansion. Later experience proved windowing to be 3-4 times as rapid as file conversion for program remediation.

6. December 1996 through December 1998: Remediation and testing phase of the project. The Y2K team peaked at 20 programmer analysts during this phase. The table below shows application data regarding the conversions:

7. January 1999 to date: Alameda County indeed met its goal of remediating and testing all enterprise computer applications by December 31, 1998. The time from the close of 1998 through the commencement of Year 2000 is being spent on the following activities:

• LPAR Testing: Throughout the two year remediation and testing phase, applications were tested using a simulation product, TIC TOC, manufactured by the Isogon Corporation. This program allowed a particular program or group of programs to be executed by working around the actual calendar date the enterprise computer was set for. Or to put it more simply, the simulation product "tricked" the enterprise computer into thinking certain programs were running on some date in the future. Although this approach fully exercised the application programs, it did not exercise the systems programs that interface between the applications and the hardware. It is necessary to test systems programs for Y2K compatibility as well as applications programs. To accomplish this, we devoted a logical partition of our IBM 9762-RB6 enterprise server to testing of our most critical application systems. This is not a simulation; it is identical to firing up an independent computer with next century dates. The following applications will be fully tested on the dates of January 3, 2000 and February 29, 2000. Fully tested means running daily, weekly, monthly, and in some cases yearly batch cycles to verify the effects of input transactions. This is very time consuming activity from both a technological and application customer time standpoint. The applications being LPARed are: Public Defender, Juvenile Probation, Adult Probation, Payroll, Criminal Justice, General Ledger, Automated Warrant Issuance, Juvenile Tracking, Family Support, and Welfare. This activity is anticipated to complete in September 1999. Additional applications may be LPARed through the end of calendar year 1999 depending on the results of earlier testing.
  
  
• Client Server Application Testing: Many of the County's newer applications are written on a client server platform using the Powerbuilder Language and a DB2 database. DB2 requires that date fields be so designated, and our Database Administration staff has insisted that all date fields be expressed as four digit years (i.e.: 1999 vs. 99). Database Administration has run periodic audits to insure that this policy is being followed to the letter. However, during 1999 critical client server applications are also being exercised in the equivalent of a Y2K LPAR to be certain that nothing slips into the proverbial "crack".

COUNTY OUTREACH:

Although the media has given more than adequate publicity to the coming of the Year 2000, the Information Technology Department has taken additional steps to inform management and employees of other departments of the Y2K problem and their responsibilities regarding this problem.

• Y2K Forums: Before the close of 1999, the Information Technology Department will have held six Y2K Forums. These Forums, aimed at County technical and management personnel, are held at the Alameda County Conference Center and attended by approximately one hundred persons each time they are held. A typical program includes:
  
  • Introduction and County Y2K Progress to Date
  • Y2K: The History and The Hype
  • Y2K: How Does It Affect You and Your Family
  • What's New with Y2K and Your Personal Computer
  • How to Develop a Y2K Action Plan for Your Department
  • Embedded Chips/Windowing Dangers/Microsoft Mail

1999 Forums are held on January 25, April 30, July 29 and October 27. Additional Forums have been held for non-County groups: two forums were held for Community Based Organizations working closely with the Social Services Department and an additional Forum was held for citizens of non-incorporated County communities.

• Bimonthly Newsletter: Every two months Information Technology publishes a two-four page newsletter. This are distributed to technical, management, and Agency and Department Heads through interoffice mail, e-mail, and distribution at Forums. Each newsletter has a featured topic: Microsoft Desktop Products, Embedded Systems, Dates to Watch For, Getting Your Desktop Ready for Y2K with Windows 95.
  
  
• Department Head Visits: From October 1998 through March 1999, Information Technology Department Director Dave Macdonald personally visited each of the County's thirty Departments and Agencies. The purpose of these visits was to inform other Agency and Department heads of the status of their applications supported by Information Technology as well as to remind them of the responsibilities of their departments in solving the Y2K issue. There are certain Y2K activities that Information cannot perform and remain the responsibility of individual departments: correction of desktop computers, remediation of any computer applications departments have developed or purchased themselves, correction of spreadsheets and databases, and the identification and correction of faulty embedded chips that exist within departments.
  
  
• Board Reports: As a result of these discussions with department heads, County Departments were asked to rate their individual progress on a percentage completion basis using three different criteria: personal computer remediation percent complete, proprietary applications remediation percent complete, and embedded chip remediation percent complete. These self assessments were forwarded to the Board on March 12, 1999. This self assessment process will be repeated and forwarded to the Board for its evaluation during the summer and fall of 1999.

CONTINGENCY PLANNING

• On Site New Year's Eve Team: There will be key representatives from each application programming area on site in Information Technology from 11:00 P.M. New Year's Eve through the early hours of the morning on New Year's day. Additionally, the entire Technical Support group, and representatives of the County's Networking group will be on site. As driving conditions, electrical supply and communications reliability will remain unknown's until Y2K actually arrives, key personnel will be on site and will not wait for a phone to ring. In addition, the County will have its Office of Emergency Services activated for New Year's eve 2000.
  
  
• Back Up Electrical Power: Information Technology will have a diesel 450KVA generator mounted on a truck on New Year's Eve day and for as long as necessary thereafter. This generator will provide power to keep the Department's computers and lighting going in the event of commercial power interruptions over the Millennium holiday. A similar approach was taken by the Department during the earthquake of 1989.