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

To: Joseph E. McIsaac who wrote (2273)	7/25/1998 1:47:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

'Will the largest firms tell us the real story? It's time to lean on businesses - hard - to reveal their project status So far, I have not used this column to instigate a campaign. Now I am going to change that. I am increasingly worried about the status of year 2000 projects in our larger businesses. It is time we found out. Two weeks ago, I commented on a Computer Weekly report that less than 80% of large companies had progressed beyond the assessment phase of their year 2000 projects and less than a third were into the testing phase. I was amazed that this was described as good news. With so little time left, it seemed to me extraordinary that any, let alone more than 20%, had yet to start conversion and that over two-thirds had still to start testing. Don't these businesses realise there are only a few months left? Are matters really as bad as this suggests? I sincerely hope not. Yet I heard something the other day that suggested that that they could be even worse. I was speaking at a seminar for accounting and IT people from the financial services industry. Now, this is the business sector that everyone agrees is leading the year 2000 charge - if 'charge' is not too positive a description. I attended another presentation by a senior consultant from a leading consulting business. He was talking about trends in network computing for the finance industry and how things might turn out over the next few years. You know the sort of thing: the potential for and merits of Windows NT, Java, etc. At the end of his presentation, he had one slide on the year 2000. It showed various layers of importance - from the least (the Bios problem) at the bottom, through concerns about operating systems and the like, to the most important (user-generated spreadsheets, etc) at the top. He said that, among most of his clients, awareness and most activity was still concentrated at the bottom. There was, he said, an urgent need to change the common perception that the year 2000 was essentially a hardware problem. I challenged this. Surely most financial services businesses were far beyond seeing things this way? If not, we really are facing a disaster. No, he said (both at the presentation and privately afterwards), he was quite sure, most effort was concentrated on fixing the relatively trivial hardware problem. I simply refuse to believe this. Either he doesn't understand what is happening or his sample is hopelessly untypical. But the truth is we don't know what stage our key businesses have reached in their programmes. And it's about time that we did. At the end of 1997, Taskforce 2000 had set up a major survey of FTSE 1,000 companies. All we needed was funding. But, by then, our government money was exhausted. We offered the opportunity to Action 2000. But they preferred to do another small and medium enterprises survey (we had just done one, and their results confirmed ours). Action 2000 decided that large organisations had "by and large" got the problem under control. That might turn out be a costly misjudgement. What is needed, as soon as possible, is a detailed, properly structured survey of our largest companies, designed to elicit exactly where they are in their year 2000 projects. It should cover everything - IT, embedded systems, supply chains, etc. It needs a sponsor and will be expensive. Any offers? Robin Guenier is director of Taskforce 2000 and a contributor to ITelligence the business information service for IT. E-mail itelligence@rbi.co.uk.