mibisystems

Last weekend the U.S. changed back to Standard Time.  I went through the semi-annual ritual of changing all the clocks in the house and I was a bit surprised at the variety of ways in which devices needed to be changed. 

How do you manage all those changes?

The computer systems changed automatically--and correctly, thanks to a patch Microsoft released in the spring to deal with Congress' latest attempt to make political hay by tweaking Daylight Savings.  Some clocks had to be wound backward, the digital ones either changed the hour directly or scrolled through the minutes; my alarm clock has a DST switch that's either on or off (pretty cool, actually).

Back in April, the revised time change caught my Linux server host by surprise with the result that my ecommerce site couldn't take payments.  It wasn't Y2K, but it did remind me that the kind of written processes revolving around Change Management are important.  Consider the corporate time domain.  Of course, anything connected to an Active Directory domain is in good shape, but not everything is.   How about those Linux and Unix servers?  Do they need to be patched?  What is their authoritative time source?  Are there dependencies on outside time synchronizations?  (That's what happened with the ecommerce site.)  And how about those battery-powered clocks on the conference room walls--are they going to be an hour off for the next six months?

As they said in the 60s, "The times, they are a' changing."  A good Change Management process can make it almost transparent.