usiness executives are not addressing the year 2000 problem. This is due to a lack of awareness in the business community, a failure to acknowledge the problem, and poorly defined roles for functional personnel in year 2000 initiatives. This lack of participation by business professionals creates major risks because of the limited prep time surrounding the critical areas between now and the millennium. To truly mitigate year 2000 risks, executives in functional areas must proactively undertake the sponsoring, funding, analysis, and review of contingency planning activities.
Lack of awareness of the year 2000 problem becomes self-correcting as information is disseminated via the mainstream press. A larger problem, however, is the Nero-like attitudes of industry leaders who refuse to call for an all-out year 2000 offensive.
For example, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said at his CEO Summit in May that it's
"pretty simple to go and find the place that [programs] compare dates," that "there's a way of fooling the system by just taking all the dates you put in and subtracting 30 years," and that "what we're seeing is an acceleration of the move from mainframe systems to PC-based systems." But it is not a simple task to find and correct date logic across tens of millions of lines of intertwined legacy systems.
Furthermore, subtracting 30 years from each date, assuming that this was practical or safe, would leave many dates falling on the wrong day of the week and throw users into disarray. Finally, the hundreds of companies I have spoken with are certainly not dumping their mainframe systems and replacing them with PCs. With Gates sharing these insights with senior executives and government leaders, it's no wonder we cannot get their attention or support.
Because of these kinds of comments, business leaders must move from the role of passive bystander to joint owner of the year 2000 solution.
A recent
survey at a year 2000 seminar found that each of the more than 150 companies represented had a year 2000 project under way. More than half of these companies were actively converting systems. Yet when asked who considered business-level sponsorship adequate within their organizations, not one audience member raised a hand.
Sponsorship goes hand-in-hand with funding a year 2000 initiative. Without business sponsorship, funding must be reallocated on a continuing basis. To meet this challenge, one financial institution had the chief financial officer sign on as business sponsor, while another appointed its chief legal counsel. These moves were essential to ensure that functional managers complete a risk assessment and initiate research into business-partner compliance activities. Risk analysis correlates business functions with the systems and external entities that enable those functions, and is the basis for establishing priorities for the resolution project. The results of this analysis aids the creation
of contingency plans that can be invoked given that a system does fail. And risk analysis shows where analysts must intensify testing efforts.
Ongoing education of business professionals is essential. Raising the topics of risk analysis and contingency planning serves as a wake-up call. But awareness of the problem by business executives must be coupled with a clear definition of their roles. Executives must craft and prioritize resolution strategies as part of the overall planning process. They must also share resolution plans with customers, stockholders, and the press. Finally, they need to explain problems as they arise and before they get out of hand. If business professionals are out of the loop, a company is not adequately addressing the full scope of the year 2000 problem. When that happens, everyone pays the price.
William M. Ulrich is president of Tactical Strategy Group Inc., a Soquel, Calif., consulting firm specializing in architecture transition strategies, and is co-author of
Th
e Year 2000 Software Crisis: Challenge of the Century
(Yourdon Press, 1997). He can be contacted at
tsginc@cruzio.com
.
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usiness executives are not addressing the year 2000 problem. This is due to a lack of awareness in the business community, a failure to acknowledge the problem, and poorly defined roles for functional personnel in year 2000 initiatives. This lack of participation by business professionals creates major risks because of the limited prep time surrounding the critical areas between now and the millennium. To truly mitigate year 2000 risks, executives in functional areas must proactively undertake the sponsoring, funding, analysis, and review of contingency planning activities.
