collection

3. Lessons Learned

The actions required to mitigate problems resulting from EPACT 2005 pointed out a number of areas where changes needed to be made both in application development and administrative practice:

  • Date and time information needs to be stored as completely as possible with as few assumptions about the context as possible. In some cases, incomplete date and time representation made reliable data conversion impossible.

  • Systems and devices need to accommodate timezone and DST changes more easily, automatically, and correctly.

  • Conversion tools, patches and documentation need to be easily accessible.

  • Conversion tools, patches and documentation need to be available in a timely manner so adequate testing can be performed. In many cases, the remediation started too late.

  • The interaction between patches, as well as the sequencing of patches, needs to be understood and clearly communicated.

  • System Administrators need to be more familiar with the systems they support and interactions between those systems. This includes locally developed applications and systems, and applications elsewhere within the organization.

  • Mitigation and remediation need to take place as early as possible using robust tools.

  • Relevant and complete information needs to be made available in a timely fashion by vendors to their customers, and from IT staff to the people and organizations they support. The information needs to be clear and appropriate for each audience.

  • End users need to have a better understanding of the tools they use to perform their jobs. Knowing what to look for and expect will help when troubleshooting problems, as well as make them more productive users of these systems. Many users do not use an external source of authoritative time information and some do not even configure their desktop computers to the correct tie zone and/or DST settings. Concomitantly, vendors need to make these things easier to do and to validate.

  • Authoritative clearinghouses for situations such as this DST change can be very valuable but do not always exist, nor do they necessarily materialize in a timely fashion.

CalConnect’s role as a promoter of calendaring and scheduling standards put the consortium in a unique position. By publishing web pages with both informational articles and links to resources on publicly-accessible websites, the consortium was able to act as a clearinghouse of DST-related resources. The consortium also put out informational press releases to both industry and general news providers.

However, CalConnect could have made a greater contribution. The consortium was very active and visible in the last 6 months of 2005, but did not keep the DST-related issues and concerns in front of the media, the IT profession, or the public again until February 2007. In retrospect, raising IT awareness throughout calendar year 2006 would have been very useful.