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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Eddy who wrote (8882)	10/5/1999 10:23:00 AM
From: flatsville	Respond to of 9818

David-- You wrote: Bitten too many times to blindly accept that "no news is good news." No news is just that no news. I've been reading back issues of y2k journal lately and have noticed some disturbing commentary that indicates your maxim re: news couldn't be more true. My perception is that all is not well for many large companies and they are not aware of it themselves. Take this comment for example re: testing from Don Estes: The reports that say only 50 percent of sites worldwide are conducting effective 20xx testing have generated some significant concern. Our own experience supports these findings. Our experience indicates typical testing plans at sites with significant vulnerabilities are inadequate for their risk profiles. Such plans are frequently adequate for sites with moderate and low-risk profiles. Implementation may be another matter... y2kjournal.com And this comment re: testing triage also from Don Estes: ...When programs just abend, it?s not too bad ? we back up the database or reload the files, fix the offending logic and restart the process. Yes, if we have hundreds of such abends in a single day, (that can be a real headache), but it?s very different from data corruption, which is the silent killer. Consider two examples: One company, a major foods distributor in the United States, detected data corruption in their primary database, but could not locate the source. Ultimately, a team of knowledgeable application experts took three and a half weeks to track down the problem, that took 10 minutes to fix. Fortunately, in this case, the application could continue to run with work arounds, and cause no monetary damage to the business. The other example was not so lucky. In February 1999, a remediated and tested application had to be shut down due to corruption. The outage lasted 10 days before being diagnosed, repaired and the data recovered. During that time, the chain of retail stores had to operate without the necessary primary computer support. We considered it good news that the total estimates of direct losses came to only $2.5 million, which is an example of how people can cope and keep the doors open even with unforeseen contingencies. These are early examples but they illustrate what can happen when the major problems start to occur. When the primary system is out, management will not care that the ancillary reports were also tested. After the dust settles, they will want to know why the core programs had not been tested more. Perhaps attorneys will be asking the same question in court... y2kjournal.com Of course those companies that are choosing not to test are not in fact "done." We have no idea who they are but we can assume it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50%. It is also clear from Estes that what testing is taking place may need to be reassesed. The dismal numbers for large companies (see below) out of CIO Magazine/ISACA/Yardeni become "frightening" if Estes observations are in fact the trend rather than the exception. - 81% of companies are not done remediating the Y2K problem - 30% of companies are behind schedule. - 21% of respondents selected the third quarter 1999 as their completion date. - 27% of the number selecting fourth quarter 1999. - 12% plan to complete their Y2K remediation in 2000 or beyond. - 23% are waiting for Y2K compliant mission-critical software from third-party suppliers. - 40% believe between one and 10% of their critical systems might fail. - 30% of companies are presently implementing contingency plans. - 48% of companies are without a formal plan and/or still in the process of creating one. biz.yahoo.com In light of Don Estes' recent comments I have serious concerns re: that 27% selecting fourth quarter 1999 as their completion date for y2k remediation. Will that include testing? Adequate testing? That 40% expecting a critical mission systems failure now seem like an optimistic number to me. --Of course if Mitch Ratcliffe is you primary source of information you're not even aware of the dismal CIO Mag. results as he has chosen not to report the poll results on his zdnet site. As I've said before he misses a lot either because he's incredulous or incompetent. As a good news hypster perhaps he needs to read this: y2kjournal.com