In the past month, Bell County has fixed a Y2K computer issue that if ignored had the potential to throw part of the county criminal case management system into disarray.
The issue actually has roots back to before the turn of the century when businesses and governments throughout the world worked to fix potential software glitches tied to dates in computers.
In 1998, Bell County hired a company named Access to Information, based out of the Chicago area, to fix any Y2K issues with county software.
“The company put in a limited fix,” said Ned Roehrig, who administers the county’s information systems. “We expected we would have rewritten all that software by now.”
The patch that ATI used to fix the system used 09 instead of 00 as a cutoff date to identify the century. During the past eight years Roehrig said the county has rewritten about 25 different applications.
“This is the last piece,” he said about the case management system. “Everything else has already been done.”
In the past month, the issue was brought up to county commissioners because the county clerk’s office needed to begin entering 2009 court dates for soldiers who would be returning home from deployments.
Rather than work against the clock to get a new case management software system implemented before the end of the year, Roehrig said he was able to put another patch on the system using 40 as a cutoff date instead of 09.
“It just made more sense to make that change right now. We don’t have any actual case dates in our system until the ’80s,” Roehrig said. “It wasn’t that big a deal. It was very minor. A few hours and it was over with.”
County Clerk Shelley Coston said the software fix has been working fine and her office has entered ’09 dates into the computer without encountering any troubles.
The county still has plans to upgrade its case management system by the end of the year.
Roehrig said there have been delays as functionality was added to the system to make the final product better.
County clerks, attorneys and court coordinators use the case management software. Y2K issues are not expected to be a concern with the upgrade as it will have four digit dates for transactions needing a year entry.
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