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Small Businesses Head For Year 2000 Disaster
Excerpt from: techweb.com
"Small businesses are heading for disaster because
they are grossly underestimating the work needed to
fix the looming year 2000 computer glitch, a report
said Wednesday.
Although 97 percent of small and midsize companies
said they have "an understanding of the business
implications of the year 200 problem," 45 percent
have not even completed a preliminary audit to check
their exposure to the problem, said a survey
published by British researcher Tate Bramald
Consultancy.
Roughly 57 percent of these businesses have not yet
even allocated a budget in 1997-98 for resolving the
glitch, even though recoding software to deal with
the problem will take an estimated 12 to 18 months
for most companies, Tate Bramald said.
"Most people are not going to be ready for the year
2000," said Jyothi Banerjee, managing director of
Tate Bramald Consultancy, which carried out the
survey for the British government-backed Taskforce
2000 awareness-raising group.
"If people think that they can wait until 1999 or even
next year before starting to do something, then you
have got to question their understanding of the
problem," Banerjee said. "The picture is not a happy
one."
The problem is particularly serious, he added,
because small and midsize businesses account for
the vast bulk of all business -- 90 percent of all
companies, in the case of the United Kingdom.
More than 80 percent of smaller companies expect to
fix the problem in-house, despite evidence that the
problem is too serious for them to tackle alone, the
survey said.
The industries most at risk are retail and transport,
whose year 2000 fixes are thought to be more
complex and difficult than those of many other
industries, Tate Bramald said." |
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