One of the most stressful Y2K situations in January is likely to be when online applications with multiple users are down (not available to users), or are available but are having problems, or appear to be trouble-free but in fact are incorrectly processing transactions. A department that is responsible for an on-line computer system may not be able to wait until Monday, January 3rd, to discover Y2K-problems if they also want to provide a high level of service to the users of that system.

Department managers who want to minimize the impact of such Y2K problems should consider the following actions:

• Identify problems early by processing transactions on Saturday.
  For online systems, this should mean having users run real transactions through such systems on Saturday, January 1. (In fact, because of different roles, multiple users may be needed to fully process transactions.) If a representative group of transactions is input on Saturday, then there should be very few surprises on Monday, January 3rd, when many users are online.

• Also identify problems early by running daily batch processes on Saturday.
  If daily batch processing is done on Saturday, the chances are good that there will be few surprises on Monday night when they are run for the second time in January. That will help the goal of having Tuesday be a normal business day. (Once these batch processes have run on Saturday, managers or other users should review the results to ensure that they are what ws expected.)

• Have resources available to deal with problems that are found.
  For online systems, departmental information systems staff should be available (either on-site or able to be contacted) to begin fixing problems on Saturday, January 2nd, should users identify problems.

• Adjust any weekly and monthly processing jobs as necessary.
  Adjustments may be needed so that all transactions and batch processing on January 1st and 2nd are included in the appropriate weekly and monthly processing jobs in January.

Department managers that are not familiar with procedures for having employees be available for work on non-scheduled days should contact the campus Human Resources department for guidance.

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