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GCN Home > 03/05/07 issue

System chiefs run for daylight

Change management is key to making sure apps will be able to spring forward

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

The experts agree: This month’s shift in the start of U.S. daylight-saving time will not be the end of the world.

“It’s not going to be another Y2K,” said Bob Woolley, director of technical quality management for Lee Technologies Services Inc. of Fairfax, Va.

That does not mean that network administrators will not have headaches if they are not prepared to move clocks in their applications ahead one hour at 2 a.m., March 11. The problems could range from minor inconveniences to “a little chaos.”

“At worst, you might show up for a meeting an hour late” if your online calendar has not been updated, said Jason Werner, product marketing manager for Novell Inc. of Waltham, Mass.

But, “at financial institutions, where large amounts of money are involved, it could be a big problem,” said John Venator, president of the Computing Technology Industry Association Inc. of Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.

Organizations that process time-sensitive transactions will have to make sure their systems are synchronized with the proper local time. An hour’s difference could cost someone a large piece of change or might prevent a transaction from occurring.

The size of your time-induced headache will depend largely on how current the updates are on your IT systems, the extent to which your IT systems interface with physical control systems, and the number of devices you will have to lay hands on if you have to manually adjust clocks in unsupported software.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended daylight-saving time throughout most of the United States and its possessions by one month. It now begins on the second Sunday in March rather than the first Sunday in April and will last until the first Sunday in November rather than the last Sunday in October.

The last time daylight-saving time changed was 20 years ago, before interconnected global networks ruled our lives.

“It’s a classic case of unintended consequences,” CompTIA’s Venator said of the change.

Time standards

Networks use Coordinated Universal Time—or Greenwich Mean Time—as an international standard, but many endpoint devices and applications maintain local time as a matter of convenience and to synchronize with functions that need to take place at specific local times. Many applications pick up the time from the operating system, but some maintain their own local time files.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Business Process Management, Enterprise Architecture



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