Reports of 3rd party testing verification coming out - not
good
asked in the TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) Q&A Forum
Flaws found in Y2K conversions
By CHRISTOPHER PRICE and AVI MACHLIS
The Financial Times
Checks by some of the biggest corporations in the United States
and Europe have revealed serious flaws in work already
undertaken to tackle the millennium computer bomb.
Unisys, the U.S. computer systems and services group, said a
testing facility in Britain had uncovered problems with more than
20 of Britain's top 100 listed companies.
''Some of the issues we found would have taken their systems
down,'' said David Palmester, Year 2000 program manager for
Unisys. ''The quality of testing they have undertaken is very
worrying.''
The millennium computer bomb problem has come about because
of the inability of older systems to recognize the change of date
from 1999 to 2000. The fear is that many of these systems will
malfunction as a result.
Crystal Systems Solutions, an Israeli information technology group,
said Ford, Pratt & Whitney and a large German car manufacturer
were among 20 U.S. and European companies to commission
verification services this year for conversions done by other
companies.
''More and more companies that classified their systems as
compliant or converted are asking for verifications,'' said Ben
Levy, Crystal's vice president of marketing and sales. ''In several
cases we found date issues were either missed, not converted or
converted wrongly. The problem is that one mistake in one
program can cause a major problem to a business.''
Palmester said most of the problems being thrown up in the latest
checks were for companies which had attempted to solve the
problem in-house.
He said this often involved the company employing contractors to
address the issue who perhaps were not completely familiar with
the systems they were dealing with or the diagnostic tools they
were using.
David Marshall, managing director of Greenwich Mean Time, a
British IT diagnostics company specializing in Y2K solutions,
confirmed similar findings. ''Too many companies have attempted
to tackle the millennium bomb through a piecemeal approach to
their systems.''
Crystal said a verification job for a midsized company with 10
million to 20 million lines of computer code could cost several
million dollars and take more than three months to do properly.
The emergence of evidence that much Y2K compliance work
already undertaken may not have solved the problems will add
further concern to governments attempting to contain the situation.
It follows a report last week from Cap Gemini, Europe's biggest
software and services company, warning that it was too late for
governments, organizations and companies in the United States
and Europe to solve the millennium bomb problem. It advised the
tackling of the problem in essential services as a matter of urgency.
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