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Beginning March 11, 2007, daylight-saving time will arrive a month earlier and will end one week later than usual. For IT, that means the changes could impact the delivery of services. For IT, inconsistent handling of daylight-saving time could cause glitches in service delivery. These glitches could negatively effect business, which could negatively impact the customer.

The purpose of the change is to cut energy consumption across industries.

What’s affected?
Systems or applications relying on time or date processing functions could be affected. According to Forrester, industries that rely on precision time, such as transportation, financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, high-tech manufacturing, and process manufacturing, may be the most exposed.

Without proper planning, businesses could be negatively impacted regarding auditing and compliance.

Gartner, Inc. cited the following issues that could occur due to the changes in daylight saving time:

• Calendaring applications showing incorrect recurring meeting schedules
• Incorrect times for arrivals and departures within the travel industry
• Bank transaction errors
• Trading applications executing purchases and sales at the incorrect time
• Missed deadlines for admissions and other time-sensitive enrollment programs
• Auctions ending earlier, impacting late bids
• Cell phone and other tariff billing applications incorrectly charging peak rates during nonpeak times
• Batch recover, rollback and job scheduling processes operating off incorrect journal timestamps
• Security programs improperly denying access to IT resources

Housekeeping items
Companies waiting to address this change now are behind the curve. Be prepared to work with vendors for their solutions to mitigate risk.

As an example, Microsoft, IBM and Sun have posted information on their updates for the daylight saving time update.
Microsoft
IBM
Sun

Do nothing and all computers and applications that use local time zone information may be off by one hour for the three weeks in March and one week in November. Each business must assess whether it has time-sensitive applications that need the appropriate level of attention.