foobert,
You bring up some interesting points. Some overly optimistic Y2K "experts" made those same points a few years ago. Indeed, there is some validity to these views.
The new hardware upgrades will help. Some of the software upgrades will probably help some too. Some analysts also believe that because of the software / hardware inventories taken for the Y2K inventory phase, that organizations will have better control over their IT. When I first started working in the Y2K arena I also thought that these would be some of the beneficial results of Y2K.
Unfortunately, that is not what I am seeing. The hardware upgrades are beneficial - improved performance and storage capacity reduce some bottlenecks. The software upgrades (operating systems, utilities and applications) will eventually result in improved systems. But it will take some time before we see the benefits of the software upgrades. Programmers and users must be trained on how to use new features and workarounds must be found for any lost functionality. It will be some time before these improvements find their way into the applications.
As flatsville points out, the windowing technique only postpones the problem. But, it also adds additional overhead (additional CPU cycles) and can even introduce additional errors. In can also mean that systems can be "out of sync". One of my clients that used the windowing technique exclusively used two different cut-over dates (1950 and 1970). This discrepancy did not exist before the code was modified for Y2K.
There is also the problem of additional errors being introduced into the software when the code is remediated. Thorough testing will catch most of these new errors, but inevitably, some will still get into the production systems.
The software and hardware inventories that were created for Y2K remediation projects and were projected to give organizations better control over their IT systems seem to have been "one-shot" occurrences. I haven't seen even one organization that put procedures into place to utilize or maintain these valuable inventories. This is one of the most disappointing oversights that I have seen on my Y2K contracts. Y2K mid-managers seem to treat Y2K projects just like any other project. They don?t seem to have the ability to derived additional organizational improvements from the Y2K efforts.
At one clients site, we found that as much as 1/3 of a clients application software was "dead" code. Although we created procedures to archive this "dead" code, the client chose to leave the code in production.
So, although there could be some additional benefits derived from Y2K projects, other than the hardware upgrades, I haven't seen these benefits in the organizations that I have worked with. Maybe there are some organizations that have taken advantage of these Y2K projects, but from my experience, most don't seem to know how to add value to their organizations.
Hope this helps.
B.K. |
