For 4 weeks each year, double-check your calendars – AND your business processes!

From the department of unintended consequences…

It's old news, now, that the US and Canada are shifting daylight savings time, for some  good reasons, such as reducing carbon emissions. However, we are also introducing uncertainty into many scheduled, measured, coordinated and logged events for 4 weeks per year for the next few years.

From Verizon Wireless's announcement…

With the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the United States government has established changes to the duration of Daylight Saving Time (DST). Beginning in 2007, DST will now remain in effect each year between the second (2nd) Sunday of March until the first (1st) Sunday of November (e.g., March 11, 2007 through November 4, 2007).

While this change primarily impacts the United States and Canada, it also impacts any users who interact with or send calendar invitations or who are dependent upon date/time calculations with companies and persons within the United States or Canada.

What struck me about this change was the enormous potential for disrupt this presents for businesses who count on knowing what time it is, here and now, related to there. The old pattern of daylight savings time is embedded in millions of electronic devices. In adjusting to the change here, we considered our routers, servers, desktop computers and cellphones (some with TWO patches), GPS units, and any other devices where we count upon accurate logging of now (electronic transactions, phone calls, instant messages, network logs, security camera time stamps, etc.). I wonder at the potential for serious unintended consequences at hospitals, in manufacturing, in air transport, etc.

Also significant in Verizon Wireless's advisory was the fact that you must patch technology in a cascade sequence – from server to desktop to synchronized mobile device – or you risk introducing even more disrupt.

Yet we don't just have ourselves to worry about. We schedule with other businesses and individuals. They all must get their patches applied, and in the right order, so that our calendar and theirs, on servers, computers and phones, agree.

Three pieces of advice – two tactical and one strategic:

1. When creating appointments in the “uncertainty zone”, (the two weeks following the second Sunday in March, and the two weeks prior to the first Sunday in November) type the agreed-upon time into the appointment title, and recommend the same for your staff and colleagues – especially those abroad with whom you work. Create an annual recurring reminder so you can remember to do this in October, and next year, as well. That way, if some person or device in the chain slips up, and the 10 am meeting suddenly shifts to 9 or 11 am, you'll have a way to know.
2. If you don't already, confirm your appointments by phone the day before.
3. Ask your operations, production, security, finance and IT leaders to double-check their processes to ensure that all mission-critical time-keeping hardware, software and firmware has been tested, and if necessary, upgraded or compensated for.

In the following weeks, the unintended short-term costs of this change will become apparent – time will tell.