In the midst of preparing for DST, the Red Cross on Jan. 16 brought in a new chief technology officer, Nida Davis Roemer. Davis previously worked at the Federal Reserve Information Technology office in Richmond, Va., where she served as an assistant vice president and chief architect. Her first major task at the Red Cross: the time change.

With an internal DST readiness assessment in hand, Roemer and her IT team dove into the project, identifying six core applications and another 50 related mission-critical apps that had to be updated. The Red Cross has some 200 applications in use, and of those 158 needed some kind of remediaton.

The six core applications include a national blood computer system and programs the Red Cross uses to collect blood testing results, maintain records for blood drive donations, conduct case management in times of disasters and run its e-mail systems.

To accomplish its goal, a team of 16 people was created, including a specialist in system architecture, a lead engineer, a project manager and a risk management officer to help oversee every detail of the work. Communication was key: The team met twice a week to review progress, while Roemer met with the project manager every morning for updates and spoke with the team members by phone at the end of each workday. "This was very helpful because of the level of complexity of the project," Roemer said.

With a wide assortment of hardware, software, testing, compatibility issues and interdependencies to review and update, the core team and the rest of the Red Cross' 600 IT staffers had plenty to track and accomplish, she said. Some of them occasionally slept in the agency's data center while working nights and weekends.