The Year 2000 Problem

Introduction

The coming of the new millennium poses an imminent and well-documented threat to most business and government organizations. Despite the tremendous energy exerted by industry experts, the media, vendors, and government agencies over the last two years to build awareness and sound the alarm, current surveys concerning Year 2000 readiness are very pessimistic. While an increasing number of corporate executives are now aware of the problem, and most major corporations and government agencies have started risk analysis efforts, few have made significant progress towards actually converting or remedying defective software applications. Consider the following commentary published in September 1997 by the Gartner Group, a prominent information technology advisory services firm based in Stamford, Connecticut.

"As both industry awareness and our coverage of the Year 2000 problem have expanded, we have become more and more pessimistic. We believe that at least 30 percent of all organizations will have Year 2000 related mission-critical outages in their application portfolio."

Today, fewer than 500 days remain before the Year 2000 - less than 350 working days. This may sound like plenty of time to attain Year 2000 compliance. Reality tells us different. If an application portfolio is relatively large (2 million lines of code or more) and the compliance program is not already deep into the remediation phase, then the organization is already seriously behind schedule. A recent study published by International Data Corporation (IDC) found that the typical Year 2000 project in a Fortune 1000 company takes 27 to 39 months to complete, with testing and validation requiring almost a year. The harsh reality is, many applications that rely on forward-looking calculations will fail before Year 2000. In fact, many already have.

The point is, while planning and risk assessment are essential to the success of any Year 2000 compliance project, it is imperative that enterprises move rapidly from these stages to actually remediating their software portfolios.

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