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The Cost of DST Changes
One of the conversational topics I ran into over and over the first of this week was “what does all this DST patching cost?” Larry Dignan has an estimate and the numbers aren’t pretty. By Larry’s estimate we spent $1 billion in IT costs and saved $360 million. Sounds like the kind of investment that the Feds make all day long.
Posted by windley on March 14, 2007 9:38 PM
Comment from Jesse Harris at March 15, 2007 8:38 AM
I don't doubt this estimate. The company I work for makes time and attendance software as well as time clocks and we've been swamped with call volume concerning the DST change. (Amazingly enough, some people are calling us up to three weeks after the change to report their issues!) Since we still support a fair number of legacy products, many of our customers are using an OS without support or a patch for the new DST times. This causes some serious problems for the audit trails in our software since we now depend on the client to fix their PC's time manually.
The upshot is that a lot of aging software and hardware will finally be put out to pasture. Nothing jacks up support costs like having to support 16-bit software running on Windows 98.
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