Sounds like a harmeless enough idea, doesn't it?
Let's move back Daylight Savings Time in the US, and potentially save some energy.
The last time we did this, back in the 1980s, it seemed to work out pretty well.
Fast forward to 2007, and the world is a very different place.
It's Not As Easy As It Sounds
Back in the 1980s, the world was a different place. We had maybe less than a million IT devices that needed to know about time changes. Today, I'd hazard a guess at maybe hundreds of millions of IT devices in the US alone.
Back then, these devices mostly lived in data centers, where they had a specialized group of IT people that knew every thing about them. Today, there's a lot less IT people, and a whole lot more of IT landscape.
Some of the people I talked to called this a "mini Y2K exercise". Once again, IT had to identify everything that might be affected, get a patch, install the patch, verify the patch and hold their collective breath come Sunday morning.
It's not just reprogramming your alarm clock and VCR anymore, folks.
And There Was Some Tough Going
I heard about one large IT user that drove their Exchange environment bonkers with a patch. Don't know exactly what happened, but I heard that Exchange immediately tried to reschedule every calendar item for hundreds of thousands of users, crippling the network, the servers, the storage and of course spamming everyone.
And then there was the Java patch that was probably worse than the original problem. Not to blame Sun excessively, but if it wasn't them, it would have been someone else.
During the last few weeks, as I met with customers, preparing for DST was on everyone's mind, looming as an impending crisis with unclear impact and boundaries.
The IT impact was bad enough, but there was more ...
We're Global Now, Aren't We?
I don't know about you, but I routinely work with people around the globe. There's a cadence of conference calls that are orchestrated to keep everyone moving along in the same direction.
Now I have to go look at each of them and ask the question -- was this one fixed so the time is right? Or do I have to juggle the calendars of everyone?
And, of course, I'm not 100% clear when the other countries are now doing DST, so at some point, the calendars will re-synch again. Sheesh.
How many times is this story playing out?
What Does It All Mean?
As I write this, it's Monday morning. I'm a bit groggy with the time change, but the world seems to be mostly working as normal, thanks to thousands of diligent IT workers around the world.
The scary thing around all of this is what it says about our political leadership. I think many of them don't really understand what the world looks like in 2007.
The fact that IT which runs the world, and knows about time, is pervasive globally. And that much of our economy is globalized, which requires some standards regarding time that don't change arbitrarily.
It'd be one thing if a smaller, less-developed nation decided to arbitrarily change the time base.
It's another thing when the world's largest economy decides to unilaterally change the time base and cause global impact without even being aware of the consequences.
I saw a few US legislators speak to the camera on this topic. I don't think they understood the impacts of what they were doing.
And that's a bit scary, isn't it?
Let's just hope that they don't decide the move was a bad idea, and decide to put it all back again.
If I could put a subject line on a comment it would be "get over it". This certainly seems to be a big issue in the US, but in Australia there have been a number of time zone changes. For the Sydney 2000 Olympics and the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth games they impacted my timezone, and they were for that year only. For most systems, this mean that the old timezones had to be restored before the start of the next DST.
Sure this was a pain, but it wasn't the end of the earth, and I for one am in favor of Daylight Savings time, as I enjoy still having daylight when I get home.
Posted by: OH | March 16, 2007 at 02:38 AM