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

To: John Mansfield who wrote (927)	1/19/1998 7:14:00 PM
From: Bill Ounce	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9818

InformationWeek: IT Skills Drought Worsens techweb.cmp.com The already-critical shortage of IT skills is getting worse-and it's driving IT executives to seek new solutions. [...] "The problem has been getting much, much worse over the last year," says Honorio Padron, CIO at computer retailer CompUSA in Dallas. "It's harder to find people, and when you get them, they stay for much shorter periods." CompUSA is shortening deadlines on internal IT projects. "You have to try to finish them before people leave and before the remaining people get burned out," Padron says.

To: John Mansfield who wrote (927)	1/20/1998 11:19:00 AM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

Euro, Sap, Baan, compliance, ... Found on C.S.Y2K, thanks to Chris Anderson. John ---- The Country letter: Number 010 <snip> I have been doing some cleanup of my files recently and in the process of reorganisation was sifting through my growing pile of Euro clippings. A rather cold feeling started to assail me. Europe is one our largest trading partners. Our perceptions about Euro are that it is "their" problem. I know of no efforts currently under way to ascertain if we will have to make any adjustments to our systems to accomodate Euro. And I rather suspect that we should be taking a very hard look at it now. Now the date of Euro implementation seems to be a little vague. Clinton has requested a delay to the original 1999 implementation because of Year 2000 resource conflicts. I remember sitting in the Hilton Hotel in London last March listening to Peter de Jager laying down the law on the absolute need to defer Euro until 2004. To my shame, I was more involved in running over my own talk in my head and was not really paying proper attention. Recently I was browsing a presentation given by Prof Gerhard Knolmayer of Berne Unversity to a recent Conference. Essentially he was saying that Europe is not as interested in Year 2000 as the US. And one the interesting points he made was that Europeans consider that ERP products such as SAP and BAAN have solved the problem for them. On the face of it this is relatively true. If you go into the SAP or BAAN websites you are hit on the head with the fact that their products are Year 2000 compliant. It has become a marketing strategy. For my sins, I have worked on and programmed in both. And although they give you the tools to do so, it is not absolutely inherent in the architecture of either that the correct date must always be used. It has to do with setup and options and programming standards. If the environment on which SAP or BAAN is running has not been set up to be compliant, then the application suite, and data derived therefrom, will not be. And I am seeing this happen more and more in the marketplace. If your implementation team is not aware of the implications, and I am discovering that 99% of the SAP and BAAN people that I speak to are not, then you have little hope of installing a compliant solution. If implementation teams insist on installing the packages with two digit year options, they are making a rod for their own backs. What worries me especially is the mindset of the implementers. When I gently pointed out the problem and indeed make specific suggestions on how they can get it right, I meet absolute denial. They will not even consider the possibility that there could be a problem. Mules are more pliant. Now I would suggest that the marketing organisations behind SAP and BAAN had better address this issue now, before damage is done. The education process had better be modified rather quickly. The date options must be implemented on initial install, before any data is written to the database. We need specific installation hints and caveats, not marketing hype. I am seeing SAP being installed on NT 3.5 without Service Pack 5. This is just not going to work. People are attempting to install Logistics within 6 months. Just because a package can be installed in that time does not mean that your organisation is ready to use it. But, hey, nobody listens to me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Chris Anderson email: slug@fast.co.za Y2K Cinderella Project webmaster@cinderella.co.za cinderella.co.za Striving for Year 2000 Compliance ------------------------------------------------------------------------