Denver-Based Tava Technologies Offers Quiz on Year 2000 Problem
By Leyla Kokmen, The Denver Post
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Jul. 20--Tava Technologies released a questionnaire Friday aimed at
helping companies assess what they need to do to make sure their factories,
office buildings and corporate headquarters won't be shut down by the Year
2000 computer problem.
While a lot has been said about the Year 2000 problem and the havoc it
could wreak across the world's computer systems, less focus has been placed
on what companies need to do to make sure the so-called "embedded systems"
will make it smoothly into the next millennium.
"We want to get them to the level of understanding that will get them
aware of what they're doing," said Tava CEO John Jenkins. "We want to get
people thinking in the right direction."
Tava, based in the Denver Tech Center, is one of a number of companies
in Colorado and across the country that offer solutions to the Year 2000
problem.
The Year 2000 problem is a computer glitch that stems from a shortcut
programmers used in computer code: Instead of using four digits for the year,
they used only two. So unless that's changed, computers are likely to
recognize the "00" in 2000 as 1900.
Instead of focusing on a company's information technology systems --
those are usually centralized, easy to access and located in clean computer
rooms -- Tava, whose clients are Fortune 500 companies, looks at other
computer systems, including those that run factories, said Jenkins.
These factories could have thousands of different pieces of equipment
and software that control and automate manufacturing, and all of these have
to be looked at for Year 2000 compliance.
Other complications, Jenkins added, include the fact that the factories
might be scattered around the country, and within the factory the computers
might be in hard-to-reach places, between pipes and heavy equipment.
For the past year, Tava has been looking at the Year 2000 problem in
factories. Almost every facility the company looked at has shown potential
for some type of production problem going into the year 2000. About 85 to 90
percent of the hardware is generally Year 2000 compliant, but the software
running on that hardware, or connecting the different types of hardware, is
generally only 40 to 50 percent compliant, according to Tava. The
questionnaire Tava released aims at asking CEOs tough questions about their
companies, not to scare them into thinking the world will end on Jan. 1,
2000, but to show them how to get started so they can reduce their risk. The
questions include:
-- Does my organization have a comprehensive Y2K readiness program in
place?
-- Is the program managed via a strong central program office that
exercises control, or is it a highly decentralized effort with central
coordination?
-- Does that program include specific focus on process control and
automation systems or facility support systems? The full checklist will be
available on Tava's Web site at www.tavatech.com.
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