Pseudo-Solutions Frustrate Year 2000 Glitch
Fixers
(09/22/97; 10:00 a.m. EDT)
By Andy Patrizio, TechWeb
Last weekend, the mainstream news media such as
CNN went crazy over news that a 14-year-old in
New Zealand had come up with a magic solution to
the year 2000 programming glitch. But people in
the computer industry, particularly year 2000
experts, rolled their eyes and ground their teeth in
frustration that once again, the press tried to
present a magic solution to a problem that has no
easy answer.
"Silver bullets are impossible," said William
Ulrich, president of Tactical Solutions Strategies,
which specializes in the year 2000 problem, in
Soquel, Calif. "These people think it's child's play,
and it's not. You've got the best and brightest in
the world working on this, and there's a lot of
ingenious solutions that don't work."
The resentment is aimed not at the people
promising magic solutions, but toward a
mainstream press that jumps on these claims,
looking for quick, simple solutions that neatly fit
into a two-minute sound bite without an
understanding of the depth surrounding the year
2000 problem.
"These headlines are irresponsible. I think every
time the press give credence to [quick solutions],
then we have a problem. This is the S&L crisis
multiplied by 30," said Peter de Jager, president of
de Jager & Co., a year 2000 consultancy in
Brampton, Canada. De Jager runs Year2000.com, a
Website dedicated to the issue of preparing for the
century change.
For both Ulrich and de Jager, both highly
recognized for their knowledge in the field of year
2000 issues, the mainstream news media looking
for quickie solution-driven in two-minute sound
bites is frustrating for them. "The press will give
these guys a little spotlight but never punish them
for lying," Ulrich said.
"I don't appreciate being called Mr. Doomsayer. I
don't appreciate Newsweek saying I make a living
scaring the pants off people," de Jager said. "All
I'm saying is we have a problem and why aren't
you working on it? And the other people are being
glorified for having a solution that doesn't exist."
15 Minutes Of Fame
The New Zealand teen, Nicholas Johnson, gained
his 15 minutes of fame by saying he had a program
called Beyond 1999 that would identify and fix the
problem. But the reports did not specify what
systems it ran on. CNN reports showed him sitting
in front of an aging PC that was running DOS.
Later in the week, news came out that his solution
was for the PC only, and the vast majority of the
problem resides on mainframes.
This isn't the first such story. In June, the Wall
Street Journal ran a front page story on a retired
IBM engineer who said he had a method for
trapping calls to date routines and changing how
the application responded to them. But the solution
wasn't viable because programmers didn't use
those date calls to begin with.
The most radical solution was allegedly discovered
in August, when New Scientist magazine came up
with the brilliant but inexplicable notion of simply
shutting off the computer on New Year's Eve in
1999. Somehow this would fix the BIOS
problem in some computers, which makes no
sense, because even when it's off, the clock keeps
running. The problem isn't in the BIOS, it's in the
thousands of MVS applications running on
mainframes that must remain up and running 24
hours per day. Still, Reuters and CNN ran with it.
In his travels as a consultant, de Jager has found an
alarming number of Fortune 200 companies that
have not begun to prepare for the century change,
or others with their heads in the sand. "We still
have people in large organizations who think Bill
Gates will solve this," he said.
Jim Duggan, a research director for IT research
firm Gartner Group, in Stamford, Conn., is also
seeing a disturbing number of people who think the
year 2000 problem can be fixed with a magic
wand. "What we see is an awful lot of otherwise
intelligent business people grasping at these [quick
fix stories] as evidence that they don't need to do
anything yet."
A survey by the Cambridge
Information Network found
that 35 percent of the CIOs
said year 2000 issues were a
"minor inconvenience," and
that 78 percent are devoting
less than 10 percent of their
budget to dealing with the
problem. Most of the CIOs
said they were more
worried about management
issues, which is what the
year 2000 problem will be very soon.
Part of the problem, according to Gartner Group's
Duggan, is that a year 2000 project is a huge
investment with no payback or return on
investment. It hasn't dawned on companies yet that
the investment essential to simply staying in
business.
BankBoston, the second largest bank in New
England, expects to spend $50 million on its year
2000 effort and has programmers working around
the clock in three shifts. Public companies have
started issuing notices to shareholders that
expenses to correct the year 2000 problem will
impact the bottom line measurably.
"We do have one solution" to the problem, de Jager
said. "Roll up your sleeves, get to work, and fix it." |
