2007 News

March 6 , 2007

Bucks County Commissioners Announce Info Tech Readiness in Preparation of Early Daylight Savings Time

With Daylight Savings Time (DST) moved ahead three weeks to March 11, the Bucks County Commissioners and the Bucks County Information Technology Division have positioned technical resources necessary to respond and react to issues that may arise.

‘The County has been engaged in planning for the extended Daylight Savings Time for about six months,” said Commissioner James F. Cawley. “We are confident that all systems will be working effectively, with no interruption to the county infrastructure, but have also incorporated contingency planning as an extra measure.”

Moving DST creates issues similar to a miniature Y2K, meaning almost all operating systems will need to be “patched” or re-programmed to accept the new change. Unless certain updates are applied, the time zone settings within the computer’s system clock may be incorrect during the three extra weeks on the front end, and the one extra week on the back end of DST.

A key part of the county’s effort includes the Emergency Communications Department, 911, which has worked to assure a smooth transition to the new DST. Software vendors have provided patches to update their components, and the 911 system has been tested and re-tested to handle the change. Brenton Wiggins, director of Emergency Communications said everything that could be changed early has been, and all that’s left is the manual change of clocks throughout the center.

The Information Technology Division has made changes to all of the county’s operating systems via central administration, eliminating the need to visit individual computer stations, or having employees download the changes on their own. This includes workstations, servers, switches, routers and phone systems. “This is a vendor-centric issue, and any problems would encompass all customers within DST,” said CIO Donald Jacobs. “We have made sure to test and apply updates in a timely manner and monitor any patches, and we will continue to test the system to be ready when the time change occurs.”

Jacobs also said that home computer users should sign-up for automatic updates with their operating system, ie Microsoft, to ensure their systems’ clocks change with DST.