FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TODAY
The Wall Street Journal
July 26, 1996
Businesses Make
A Date to Battle
Year 2000 Problem
WILL THE YEAR 2000 bring us together? To a degree,
it already has.
With no central leadership, a
collective effort of
unprecedented scale is taking
hold throughout the business
world. Major companies are
sharing valuable internal information. Even bitter competitors
are cooperating. "There is a rallying cry," says Mike Parfett,
an AT&T vice president.
Companies are doing this to save their computer systems
from catastrophic failure in the year 2000. Anyone slow to
join the effort risks getting locked out of the solution.
The basic problem, as everyone knows by now, is that big
computers are programmed to deal only in two-digit dates,
turning the year 2000 into "00," causing systems to tilt. Just
as vexing, the problem is hard-wired into elevator controls,
network routers, burglar alarms and the ubiquitous other
appliances of modern life. If it contains a chip, every
mission-critical device on the planet will have to be tested
against failure before the end of 1999 (and in some cases
before the end of 1998).
Recently I wrote about the efforts of one company,
Consolidated Edison of New York, to avert its own
millennium disaster. The column brought in hundreds of dire
and desperate e-mail messages from programmers and
government officials in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
But there was a subtext in all the gloom and doom. Unlike
most problems in the business world, this one, by definition,
demands a collective response. And because shared
knowledge is superior to individual knowledge, the early
returns suggest that fixing the date problem may not be as
costly as the doomsayers project.
"Every week we find a better way to do it," says Lauris
Nance, a systems executive at Equifax, the huge
credit-reporting service. As shortcuts become apparent and
one tool proves more effective than another, Equifax and
others enthusiastically exchange the details. "It's a
camaraderie that I've never seen in this industry," Ms.
Nance says.
TIPS AND TOOLS are collected and redistributed
world-wide via the "y2k" bulletin board on the Internet,
whose participants range from IBM to NEC, from the state
of Connecticut to the state of Israel. Earlier this week,
Biamax SA, a major Greek auto distributor, posted the
entire methodology by which it cured its date problems.
(One route into the year-2000 community begins at
year2000.com).
The U.S. Social Security Administration, one of the few
federal agencies ahead of the game, is sharing expertise with
other organizations all the way to the U.K. A St.
Louis-based confederation of major computer users calls
itself the "Midwest 2000 Share Group."
In the spirit of this cooperation, Chubb Corp. dropped
plans for a 1997 advertising campaign boasting of its head
start in addressing the problem. Now, instead of trying to
tarnish its competitors, Chubb is inviting them to share
methodologies. "This is not about being first," says John
Jung, a systems vice president at Chubb. "Unless we all get
it fixed, we all go down together."
Indeed, companies lately have come to recognize that fixing
their date problem is a condition of doing business in the
networked world. AT&T's big customers are increasingly
demanding assurance that its systems will be secure; AT&T,
in turn, is preparing letters asking software vendors to
warrant their products as "year-2000 compliant."
Once American Airlines puts its own systems in order, it
intends to verify the soundness of every external link, from
the National Weather Service to other airlines world-wide.
(Some airlines may not conduct midnight flights on Dec. 31,
1999).
This fury of communication is the closest thing to "the silver
lining in the millennium cloud," says a study by consultants
Chris Casey and Ted Fisher of Atlanta. Some companies, it
says, see the remedy as "an opportunity to add value to the
business of customers and vendors by sharing information or
experiences."
I DON'T MEAN to be a Pollyanna about all this. The
problem will be costly no matter what. The price tag at
AT&T is so big the company won't reveal it without first
breaking the news to its board. American Airlines may
spend roughly $100 million on the remedy -- including the
cost of nearly 500 employees rewriting its systems.
The deadline, of course, is 100% non-negotiable. The
Federal Reserve, FDIC and other financial regulators are
pressuring banks to complete repairs by 1998 to allow for a
full year of testing. "Time is critical," says a notice to the
nation's banks from a federal financial task force.
Consultants and third-party job shops will be in a position to
gouge procrastinators.
But I predict the slackers will get off their duffs soon,
because nothing motivates management like the threat of
liability. Word is spreading that tort lawyers are salivating
over the potential for shareholder suits. Beginning in the
1997 renewal season, providers of liability and
business-interruption policies will begin seeking assurances
that their customers are working to avert date failure.
Auditors will soon begin investigating their clients' date
exposure under new guidelines now being written by
accountants.
The year 2000 is a management problem, not a technical
one. Is management willing to face reality? For a long time,
the answer was no. But the fix is now beginning. Just enough
time is left to cure the system-assuming that everyone
continues working together. This is one challenge in which
the success of any business depends on how much it gives
away.
Thomas Petzinger Jr. writes "The Front Lines," a column
that appears every Friday on the Marketplace page. Tom
also answers selected questions from readers in The Front
Lines Forum, published every weekend exclusively in the
Interactive Edition. Send your questions or comments by
e-mail to TPetzinger@aol.com. |
