Year 2000 Domino Effect. Even companies who believe they have finished their Y2K work may be caught surprised. Notice the following quote and the link at the end:
A tangled web
Consider the tangled web of business interrelationships that exist among organizations. First, there are customers. Next, suppliers; vendors; financial service providers; insurance carriers; federal, state and local government agencies; electric utilities; telecommunications networks; and even competitors. If the performance or dependability of one falters, the survival of your company could be at risk.
And not all your dependencies are as big or as obvious as your supply chain or your banking relationship. Think about it: You depend on services like heating and ventilation systems, security systems, PBX systems, LANs, and other elements of infrastructure. Having blind faith and assuming that the supplier of each of these systems has correctly solved the Year 2000 problem may have disastrous consequences.
The problem is, none of these external dependencies shows up in the millions of lines of code your company inventories, scans, fixes, or tests. But even one dependency gone awry can jeopardize the stability of your firm. Just ask a chief financial officer to assess the consequences on cash flow if the overnight lock-box system fell apart. Or ask a production manager about just-in-time inventory management using undependable suppliers. If you're a retailer, consider the problem if embedded chips in point-of-sale terminals fail to operate or your VAN's EDI network crashes.
Today's businesses and government agencies have developed an integrated independence through their information systems and computer-controlled processes. If one falters, there is a rapidly cascading effect on many other stakeholders. Failure to address this integrated independence will compromise many Year 2000 projects.
datamation.com
P.S. This is an excellent article if you are developing a methodology to address your companies needs. |
