Accounting Problems Will Begin in Britain on April 6, 1999
Link:
sunday-times.co.uk
The crisis for British business will begin early, according to Don Cruikshank, who is the
head of Oftel, the British telecommunications firm. He is also the head of Action 2000,
the government's Year 2000 Awareness organization.
The article appeared in the London SUNDAY TIMES (Nov. 17).
* * * * * * * * *
Don Cruickshank, the Director-General of Oftel and now in charge of tackling the
"millennium bug", believes that companies must lay plans to have the problem
conquered by April 6, 1999, the start of the financial year.
He says: "Accounting systems, vital to all those operators providing telecoms
services, have to be changed before the beginning of the financial year that overlaps
2000. The thousands of companies that will have to carry out complex technical
changes in that year must budget for them in advance."
Mr Cruickshank is well aware of the challenge he is facing as chairman of the Action
2000 project. "As regulator of the telecoms industry, I wanted to find out if the
millennium problem was as serious as suggested, So I launched an
investigation into the industry's preparedness and have been monitoring it ever since."
. . .
"The problem is deep-seated because the microprocessors might have been buried
away and installed by a sub-contractor. The companies with equipment that could be
affected must therefore find records showing where the chips are before deciding
whether they can be reprogrammed. . . .
"The problems are crowding in. Managers who seek assurances from component
suppliers that their microprocessors are 'millennium-compliant' are not getting an
answer. When they ask for systems to be closed down for testing, they are told that is
impossible. Yet they cannot be sure that it is going to work unless they test it from end
to end. Each individual component might work but when they are all linked, the total
system might fail. They are also short of skilled people to carry out any work. It is a big
headache." |
