LOGICA MILLENNIUM SERVICES :
[email protected]

Logica Millennium Services has been set up to help organisations successfully survive the millennium. Our range of consultancy and technical skills offers a complete 'cradle to grave' service from impact analysis and planning through to conversion and testing, appreciative of the need to maintain business objectives throughout.

Logica's approach to the Year 2000

Logica's approach to the Year 2000 issue is based on demonstrated large scale project management experience. Logica has been applying this experience in working with its customers to help them tackle, what can be, a critical transition for their business.

Making an enterprise's applications correctly process dates beyond 31/12/99 is a project with a non-negiotable end-date. This has a major impact on time and resources. Logica recognises this and has built relationships with leading tool suppliers and offshore companies to enhance its ability to perform, resource, manage and control date related and other mass change problems.

Logica's overall methodology for millennium projects builds on the core standards and project management methodologies which have been developed, tested and refined over Logica's 26 year history. It consists of the three major phases described below. The deliverables from each phase are designed both to support subsequent phases and to serve as key documents within the organisation.

Systems assessment and impact

No company wants to divert money for IT away from critical and business enhancing developments, so the old adage "if it aint broke, don't fix it" still holds true. Not all the systems in the organisation will require conversion to millennium compliance; some will be replaced by new applications and some will not include business critical functionality dependent on date processing. It is important to focus time and resource on those areas of greatest need.

In the first phase it is important to construct an accurate picture of date usage and millennium compliance covering the entire systems inventory. From this, a first approximation of the effort, cost and timescale of conversion can be developed together with a prioritised catalogue of the systems which require amendment.

The main deliverable from this phase is an overall estimate, based on a combination of in-house and industry metrics, of the cost of undertaking Millennium date changes. Logica will work with the client to examine the applications inventory and produce an agreed list of applications and scope of the project.

The agreed list of application source code will be scanned for any likely Millennium impact. This will be performed using appropriate tools for the hardware platform, operating system and application language and a set of base criteria which search for date related code. These have been developed through Logica's previous experience of Year 2000 analyses. This is an iterative process. The list will require tuning to take in to account any language specific or organisation standards in the client environment. Logica will work closely with application experts and technical experts from the client to ensure that the tool criteria takes these into account.

Logica recommends the use of scanning tools to perform searches of source code. For some languages (mainframe or non-mainframe), experience has shown that an effective method of scanning these is to transfer the applications to a mainframe environment. Here standard scanning utilities can be used to perform searches based on the same criteria. These searches can require significant processing power, a task well suited to a mainframe platform. The results can then be collated easily with those from the chosen toolset for reporting purposes.

Having produced a consistent set of results across all languages and environments for the whole organisation, Logica will apply a standard set of complexity assessment criteria and effort metrics to produce a high level estimate of the likely impact of Millennium date changes. Reports will be produced at the appropriate organisational level identifying the costs, impacted applications, modules or lines of code, for use by the client in subsequent phases.

At all stages it is essential to achieve high level awareness throughout the organisation of Millennium date issues and how these could affect application developers and end-users. Logica will work closely with the client to identify and present the issues and their implications.

Planning and Pilot

This phase uses the analysis results from the Impact Assessment and builds on them to develop a more detailed analysis of the Millennium changes and to produce a detailed project plan showing which applications and programs need to be changed, how they should be changed and in what sequence.

There are many methods for solving the date problem, such as date expansion or century windowing. Each approach has its merits but no one tactic is always appropriate. Logica will, in conjunction with the client, determine the approach best suited to the client's business and time constraints.

Logica will work with the client to develop a plan which ensures that work is prioritised to satisfy business imperatives in the most effective manner. For example, where applications use libraries of common shared routines or modules these must be made Year 2000 compliant first in order that the applications which use them can subsequently be tested. Externally supplied packages should also be tested for compliance as early as possible to ensure the supplier has sufficient time to implement any changes.

Logica will help the client obtain certification from any external package suppliers and recommend that allowance is made in the Millennium Project Plan for site testing of all such application packages, regardless of certification.

Conversion & Testing

The final phase uses the previously developed Millennium Project Plan to effect and implement the changes identified.

Based on previous impact analyses performed with other clients Logica has noted that there is a general profile to the changes required for Millennium date processing. Although around 90% of an organisation's programs are generally impacted by the Year 2000, on average only 4% of the lines of code are actually affected.

Even if the results of the analysis suggest few changes are required to make the applications Millennium compliant, the plan will still incorporate a strategy for thorough testing to ensure a smooth century transition.

Track Record

Logica have built many successful relationships with blue chip organisations, based on repeated project successes. Throughout Logica there are thousands of employees capable of developing or enhancing code using a wide range of application languages in many technical environments. Combining this technical and managerial skill base with offshore resource and appropriate tools enables Logica to provide the 'one stop shop' solution throughout the lifecycle of a Millennium change.

Additional Services

User Awareness and Education Seminars

One of the problems facing IT managers is the increasingly distributed nature of systems development throughout their organisation. Not all systems are built by the IT department and, with the rise of the PC, there are many personal applications such as spreadsheets and databases which may be critical to certain business functions in the company. User awareness of how their own applications are affected is vital.

Logica can facilitate this process by providing seminars, talks and work groups to explore the issues and help users understand some of the effects of the date problem.

Once user groups within an organisation have realised the impact of the millennium date problem they will need to address it. Logica has expertise in all major areas of software development and can offer advice on how to go about specific changes to a wide variety of development platforms and languages.

European Monetary Union

In Europe, Monetary Union and introduction of the Euro will require major rewriting to many systems. Fields dealing with currency need to be identified, their usage understood, and a decision made on how best to change them. There are close parallels between EMU and the millennium date issue. Logica is currently addressing these issues for clients along side millennium projects, thus increasing the value to the organisation of performing year 2000 analysis.

Supply Chain Health Checks

Modern business depends on extensive networks of suppliers and partners supporting one another's operations. It is essential that, after an organisation fixes its own millennium problems, its success is not effected by other companies in its supply chain encountering problems. Logica can help make suppliers aware of the problem and monitor their progress so action can be taken to correct the problem and appropriate contingency plans can be made.

Legacy Transition

Part of fixing the date problem will involve moving some of the older systems to more modern platforms and languages. Logica is well placed to help organisations in this task, and in taking their systems into the next millennium and beyond. Logica's staff are involved in creating the cutting edge techniques of tomorrow while maintaining partnerships with its clients, and making sure that it understands their business issues. Logica can help formulate strategies to enable these complex transitions to be performed smoothly, with maximum business benefit, as well as providing the expertise to do the job successfully.

For more information contact :

Logica Millennium Services
Logica UK Ltd
75 Hampstead Road
London
NW1 2PL

Tel : ++ 44 171 446 1213
Email : [email protected]

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