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To: Karl Drobnic who wrote (12975)	3/21/1998 11:39:00 AM
From: Gerald L. Kerr	Respond to of 31646

From Business Week: HOW ONE COMPANY IS EXTERMINATING THE MILLENNIUM BUG businessweek.com Very sobering article about Medical Mutual of Ohio which started its Y2K remediation efforts in 1995 Mostly about business systems but relevant to the whole sector. Here are some excerpts from the article: ******* If you think fixing the Year 2000 bug is routine, talk to Mary Libens, chief ''Y2K'' troubleshooter at Medical Mutual of Ohio. The $2 billion medical insurance company in Cleveland made all the right moves. It got an early start grappling with its millennium problem. It brought in Ernst & Young consultants--some of the most experienced in the business--at bargain rates. Libens' coworkers cooperated, grasping the enormity of the problem. And senior management made Y2K a top priority. The results? At 20 months and counting to Jan. 1, 2000, Mutual is still racing to debug and test its systems. Libens' team long ago despaired of scrutinizing every date in the company's sprawling software operations and databases, which contain the equivalent of 64 billion pages. For whole swaths of noncritical programs, they've resorted to a patchwork of quick fixes, trade-offs, tricks, and triage. Through it all, a string of unpleasant surprises in the repair process, called remediation, have left Mutual's Y2K team awestruck at the task's scope. ''The job is orders of magnitude bigger than expected,'' Libens admits. ''We're scrambling.'' (Concluding paragraph) Libens perseveres, because she knows Mutual will make it through. But what of the large companies that are just getting started? In a recent survey of 450 businesses in North America, the Information Technology Assn. in Arlington, Va., found that 45% of them are still studying their systems and have yet to start fixing them. A year from now, they'll begin hitting the same kinds of hitches and delays that Mutual has been living with for four years. It's inevitable. It's software. To one and to all...Godspeed. ******* Chilling, huh! Gerry