Tuesday November 3 3:05 PM EDT
Europe Faces Early Hit From Computer Bug
By Neil Winton, Science and Technology Correspondent
CANNES, France (Reuters) - European governments are failing to protect their citizens against fallout from the millennium computer bomb, and the consequences of their inaction are likely to start at the end of this year in hospitals and welfare systems, a conference was told today.
''European governments and public sector organizations have only spent between five and 10 percent of what it needs to fix their systems,'' Gartner Group analyst Andy Kyte told a press briefing.
The governments of the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland escaped censure from U.S. research organization Gartner. The U. S. government's actions have also failed to impress Gartner.
According to Kyte, European governments are dependent on large scale computer systems to dispense welfare and run public institutions.
''The public sector is the biggest danger here. They're not doing the work at all,'' he told Reuters.
Kyte was speaking at Gartner's annual European conference, called Symposium ITxpo98.
Experts believe that many computers may crash at midnight on December 31, 1999 because they use double digit dates like 97 and 88. Computers controlling operations like payroll or pensions may die or spew out erroneous data when faced with the double zeros of year 2000.
Businesses and latterly, governments around the world, have been cranking up efforts to solve the problem before time runs out.
But Kyte explained that many computer systems which deal with dates often run operations where they need to refer 12 months ahead. This means that many computers will start to fail on December 31, 1998.
''The millennium computer problem is going to start manifesting itself as we cross into 1999. There will also be clusters of problems at key dates like the end of the first quarter,'' another Gartner analyst, Matthew Hotle, told the briefing.
Kyte said European governments were saying plenty but doing little.
''Hospitals, government procurement, defense procurement, welfare, are areas where we'll see disruption from the end of this year. The Dutch, Swedes and the Irish have done a good job, but very few European governments can stand up to scrutiny. They've been saying a lot but not really doing much,'' Kyte said.
''The federal government in the U.S. has not done a great job either, but at least it has been open about it,'' he said. |
