Why? 2K

The title refers to the short name of a problem you have. You probably don't know you have it and, even if you're aware of the problem, you don't think it's very serious. It's Y2K, the problem computers have with the year 2000. If you're running a successful small business, you probably use computers and you have the problem. If you don't use computers for business, you'll still have problems as a client of companies that do.

The problem stems from the fact that a two digit year is used in dates throughout computing. This means that computers will assume dates from the beginning of the 21st century belong to the beginning of the 20th century and the mistakes will mount up from there.

The solutions are trivial in theory - use four digits, program computers to recognize early century dates as 21st century, run find and replace programs etc. - but are daunting in execution. The problems come from identifying the work and from the scope of the work to be done.

To start with, where are you using dates and do the programs accept four digits? Does the program take the date format from the operating system? How is the date stored? Let's see, MS Word uses the date format from Windows unless you specify differently in the options. Excel displays the date the same way but stores it as the number of days starting from 1900. Wait, that was the old version and some people have Office 97. And this is just at the PC level. Banks, life insurance companies and governments, just to name a few, are still using code written in the sixties and seventies on their mainframes and they don't know where it is used, how it uses and stores dates or whether it can be changed. In most cases, it will be too late to consider changing to a completely new system.

Who is going to find these answers? How much staff will be needed? If you've ever been involved in trying to do an inventory of software used even in small companies, you can see the problem. Finally, who will be responsible for execution? How will you know the solution works?

More questions and some answers can be found here. In the meantime, use four date digits for the year in all your computer work starting now and look at how you use dates in your computer systems. The above link will get you started. You may also want to consider how you can limit your exposure to problems your suppliers, banks and governments will have.

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