Year 2000 essentially a management problem

IN case you have not heard, the Year 2000 Computer Problem is simple to describe, but complex to solve.

IN case you have not heard, the Year 2000 Computer Problem is simple to describe, but complex to solve.

We simply do not know how our computer systems will react when internally stored dates change from 1999 to 2000. For reasons that once made good sense, most of the computer systems that order our lives use the last two digits to represent the year - for example, 97 for 1997. The digits `00' for the year 2,000 are already causing problems.

It is estimated that the changeover to year 2000 could cost hundreds of billions of dollar. Fears of system melt down have been firmly implanted in popular consciousness, and stocks in small software houses, with skills to fix the problems, have leaped into the stratosphere.

Examples of the sort of problems that arise include:

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. The integrated ticketing system used by Japanese railways can issue you with a ticket to attend New Year's Eve celebrations on December 31st, 1999, but it cannot issue you with a ticket to get home again on January 1st, 2000.

. In the UK a shipment of canned food was rejected because it assumed the use by date was too far in the past (the scanning machine read the year 00 was 1900 and not 2000). The supplier was refused payment and an automatic reorder was triggered to compensate for the rejected stock.

Closer to home, the stories are generally kept hush hush, but we know for example, that lending institutions have changed their systems to cope with loans of three year duration or longer which pass the year 2000 and Irish companies producing tinned goods have had trouble recording sell by dates which occur in the new millennium.

Experts expect much more severe effects when the year 2000 arrives in areas including mortgages, insurance and other financial records, telephone bills, social welfare entitlements, medical diagnostic tests, weather systems, engineering surveys, airline systems and scientific research. If you work with systems with a three year horizon or greater, you are also approaching a problem time right now.

The problems are worrying precisely because the results are so unpredictable. One analyst suggested the following scenario Imagine you are travelling abroad in December 1999, and you phone home just before midnight on December 31st, 1999. You ring off a few minutes later just after midnight on January 1st, 2000.

Unless your telephone company's systems are in order, you could be billed millions of pounds for a call lasting 99 years that is, from 1900 to 1999.

We do not know how a software programme handles dates, we cannot predict what it will do on 1.1.2000, and we do not know how much it will cost to put it right. Prudent business managers have begun to tackle the problem.

One prominent government department recently kicked off a six figure "impact study" to assess its systems. Many other Irish organisations have Year 2000 projects well underway.

But for many Irish businesses, the fundamental questions remain unanswered: What has to be done, how much is it going to cost, and who's going to do all the work?

The first of these is a technical question, and can best be determined by a survey of existing systems. This usually involves a line by line analysis of a sample code to see how it was put together. Then one can extrapolate the impact on the rest of your software and come up with some costings.

The cost question is a tough one. According to Mr Brendan Doherty, of Delphi Software, "the problem won't go away without some investment, and many companies are budgeting high to handle the worst case".

And who is going to do the work? The problem will be more prevalent in the first world economies where many older systems are still in use. These systems are more likely to have Date 2000 problems and, therefore, will cost more to repair.

Management within organisations must take their responsibility seriously and kick start the work needed for this problem. The bottom line is that this is a management problem.