Contingency planning follows Y2K clean-up for Tower Corp

By Chris Barton

Peter Herborn wishes his company had started its Year 2000 project early in 1995 rather than in 1997. Had Tower Corporation started then, there would have been "more leeway" to look at replacement rather than remediation of its aging computer systems.

While the group general manager of development is pleased that, like most large organisations, Tower has put in place all of its Y2K fixes and tested all of its major systems for the century date change, he's also frustrated by the real cost of the project.

And he's not talking about the $9 million - spread over three years - that Tower has spent across the group on fixing the problem.

"It's a significant [7 to 8 per cent] part of our technology budget that we would have preferred to spend on newer and better things. It has lessened our ability to get on with the new things we would like to do."

Much of Tower's computing infrastructure runs on IBM mainframes or AS/400 hardware and some of the "large and complex" legacy software systems are 15 years old. Replacement within the time frame was deemed too high a risk. That meant working through a lot of old Cobol code.

Much of the fixing work was outsourced offshore - to Tata in India and CSC in Singapore - primarily because both were "price effective and had ample resources". But the whole project was run from the inside by a 20-strong team covering all of the Group's companies. Besides date change problems in computer systems, some of the more unexpected findings included:

* the need to "substantially upgrade" desktop (PC) equipment;

* non-compliant security access systems that would have resulted in doors that wouldn't open come the millennium dawn;

* lift security systems that would have shut off access to floors at the wrong time;

* the need to replace some PABX and other phone system equipment;

* having to terminate some relationships with smaller suppliers because they were unable to supply sufficient information about their own Y2K compliance.

Although the bulk of the remedial work has now been done, sorting out Y2K is far from over, Mr Herborn says.

His focus now is the "formal contingency planning process" - something he wants complete by May and tested by July. High on the agenda is working out "the people commitments" from December through to the first months of next year.

Another key critical factor in Tower's contingency planning is the banking system. Testing of the company's computer systems interfaces to the banking system is currently underway. And if there's a system failure?

"We have to revert to procedures of five to10 years ago such as presenting cheques manually."

And how does he rate the chances of an infrastructure failure?

"I'd be amazed if there wasn't a failure somewhere, but all these [infrastructure] organisations have their own contingency plans and by and large I think they're well prepared to move quickly to resolve problems."