Firms sleepwalking into computer chaos. 54% of companies lack plan to deal with millennium bug
[Note: information about all Canadian companies involved in Year2000 remediation is being posted at exchange2000.com ]
Kelly Egan The Ottawa Citizen
Tuesday 9 December 1997
Canadian businesses urgently need to wake
up, get with the program, and start attacking
the millennium bug, a new survey from
Statistics Canada has concluded.
The fall survey of 2,000 companies found
slightly more than half had no plan to deal with
the possibly catastrophic computer glitch, and
one in 10 had never even heard of it.
The potential effect of the millennium bug, often
called the Year 2000 or Y2K problem, is so
far-reaching that, left uncorrected, it could
cause malfunctions in everything from bank
balances to traffic lights to flight schedules.
Simply stated, most older computer software
identifies years only by their last two digits
(1997 is read "97"), assuming that the first two
digits are always 19. Without an adjustment, a
computer on Jan. 1, 2000 will read 00, leading the computer to assume it is
1900, causing chaos for financial institutions, transportation systems and even
bank vaults and elevators.
Conservative estimates compiled from the survey place the cost of fixing the
problem in Canada at $12 billion, though other industry estimates have put it
much higher, near $25 billion.
The federal government has assembled a blue-chip panel to address the
dilemma and yesterday it issued a warning and announced an accelerated
schedule of its own work.
"Basically, there are no excuses," said task force chair Jean Monty, president
of telecommunications giant BCE Inc. "Companies must take the time, spend
the money, devote the resources and do it now. Failing to take a formal
approach to solving the problem puts the enterprise at risk, and all of its
partners in the supply chain."
The telephone survey, done in October and November, found 54 per cent of
respondents were taking no action to correct the problem or didn't even know
about it.
The rate of inaction was higher among smaller firms (51 per cent) and midsize
firms (29 per cent) than at large ones (eight per cent). By sector, the primary
industries -- agriculture, fishing, forestry, mining -- were the worst offenders: 57
per cent without a remedial plan and a further eight per cent unaware of the
problem.
Task force secretary Alain-F. Desfosses yesterday underlined one of the
survey's most disturbing findings.
"The fact that 90 per cent of the companies are aware of the problem but only
half of them are taking any action is a source of real concern."
He said small and midsize companies need to realize that, fairly soon, larger
companies that form their customer or supplier base will want to know whether
their data and computer networks have been upgraded.
The task force announced it was launching a new communications strategy
aimed at business and was moving up its own deadline for reporting to the
federal government on the problem and a range of solutions, from May 31 to
some time in February.
He urged small companies to contact the supplier of their computer equipment
to get an update on corrective action and pointed out there is a wealth of
information available on industry and government Internet sites.
It will take an army of programmers to correct the problem, and experts have
been warning for years now that the crunch is on.
Catherine Swift, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent
Business, says she's not very surprised by the findings. Her group, which has
88,000 members, has been getting the word out to members all year, long
before the federal task force was created.
"The No. 1 message in all this for business is act now," said Ms. Swift. "You
don't have a lot of time."
She urges businesses to start finding out what their needs are and to begin
looking for someone to fix the problem. She also thinks the government should
offer "a few carrots," or tax incentives, for business to upgrade their computer
equipment.
During the past year, there has been a veritable boom in private-sector
companies geared to correcting the Year 2000 glitch.
But the survey made plain that finding someone to correct the problem may be
getting more difficult, particularly because the computer industry has yet to
devise a "magic bullet."
The preliminary indication from the survey is that businesses across the
country have identified the need for an extra 7,000 project managers, systems
analysts, programmers and testers to complete the conversions.
The problem is particularly acute for governments, which possess millions of
pieces of computer information. The federal government alone expects it will
cost $1 billion to convert its computers, a job that will require hiring about
2,000 computer specialists. |
