The Year 2000 Roadblock - continued 2

Many programs use the distinguished year values 99 or 00 to mean things like date unknown or from now until infinity, or preserve this item forever. This will clearly cause problems when these values are actually used to represent the years 1999 and 2000. Several decades of neglect and wishful thinking have created a potentially severe problem for companies that today rely on yesterday's software with these kinds of Year2000 defects. The impact on software applications, and the business functions they support, will intensify as the turn of the century nears. It's not only applications that directly perform date-related arithmetic operations, comparison, or sorting of date fields that will be affected - organizations will also experience a "ripple effect" of errors and even failure of other programs that use input from the affected programs. Applications that may experience problems include expiration dates, mortgages, bond maturities, insurance and actuarial tables, annuities, multiyear leases, contract maintenance, strategic planning and forecasting, billing and inventory, and production planning.

The Y2K problem is not a time bomb that will explode on January 1, 2000. It has already started to explode: Gartner Group refers to this as "the time horizon to failure," or THF. The THF defines the latest date at which the technology must be corrected to prevent Year 2000 date-change errors from causing serious problems. There are many applications that perform one year projections and thus have a THF of January 1, 1999 - a date that is likely to be a very bad day for the information technology industry. Unprepared companies may not be willing to write insurance policies extending past 1999, and some credit card issuers will not be able to provide expiration dates past then either.

Banking, brokerage and financial services companies as well as federal, state, and local government agencies - in short, hundreds of thousands of businesses - must face the reality of this problem or risk experiencing serious disruptions in their ability to conduct business.

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