Ian D. K. Kelly

Year 2000 projects are:

• Urgent
• Important
• Poorly understood, and
• Underfunded.

There are a lot of IT problems that will still hit us relating to the year 2000. Even though we have now passed "1/1/2000:00.00" we have still not identified all of the data that contains dates, nor all of the computers (integrated and stand-alone) that are date-dependant. The urgency is very high.

If systems cannot cope with these new dates there will be loss of business, lack of essential facilities, and a great deal of public annoyance. In some cases there will be danger to human safety. As business professionals we have to tackle the huge number of remaining year 2000 projects immediately, and we need to think through what other consequential projects will also be needed.

Do you understand your own Year 2000 problems? For example:

• Did you know that some Cobol programs used the second two letters of the month name in English to encode the month, because the first two are not unique?
• Are you certain that you know everywhere the last two digits of the year number are used? Are they used to construct file names?
• 98 is greater than 97, 99 is greater than 98 ... but 00 is less than 99. Does your code depend upon two-digit date comparisons anywhere?

I can help you explain this importance and this urgency to your managers and directors.