The Cleveland PD ran ta story today (11-3-1998) on a local company experiencing the Joanne Effect. It started in February 1998 when they tried to close the books on 1997. The system camde down hard, locked up and wouldn't allow any entries. Took about a week top correct. (IER Industries is the company) The article was clearly designed to shake the cages of iour small-medium sized companies. the reporter also talked to Progressive, one of the larger insurance companies in the country (hi! hi!) and they are now running their programs through the "time warp lab". After $6.5 Million (yes $6,500,000) they though they were out of the woods and found they were wrong! "It's nothing terrible, but it's like death by 10,000 pinpricks" said Dennis Sutcliffe, Y2K Manager for Progressive.

The article closes with a quote from the controller of IER:

"Markiewicz at IER Industries doesn't need more convincing. 'I've heard people say the Year 2000 bug is just like Grandfather's day. Everybody knows the grerating card companies just made that up to get us to spend money. The year 2000 isn't a conspiracy,' Markiewicz said. 'It's not going to fix itself automatically. I saw it firsthand.'"

Don't we love it when someone get's it !!!!!??

CR

-- Chuck da Night Driver (rienzoo@en.com), November 03, 1998

Answers

6.5 mil is beans to Progressive. Wonder where they screwed it up?

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), November 03, 1998.

Funny thing about this so-called "Joanne Effect." It's been going on for years. Actuaries have had to deal with it for at least 28 years now. My company has had a few incidents. No system lockups, but calculations looking 2 yrs. ahead produced erroneous results earlier this year.

-- Buddy Y. (DC) (buddy@bellatlantic.net), November 03, 1998.

???? I think that "The Joanne Effect" is being misused by you guys as a name for any Y2K software problem that rears its ugly head early. My understanding is that this term is specifically defined for a particular problem that will occur no earlier than 1/1/1999, when software checks to see whether that day falls within a defined fiscal year, and uses 1/1/2000 as an endpoint for the calendar year (or something like that).

-- Jack (jsprat@eld.net), November 03, 1998.

I am not a techie, but I understand the Joanne Effect to be when the computer determines what year is the "current year," what year is "last year" and what year is "next year." Along with Jack, I think that the Joanne effect starts in January '99. This is from reading this forum, Olmstead's site and Hamaski's weather reports.

-- Donna Mittelstedt (dmittels@csuhayward.edu), November 03, 1998.

Love the headline, though!

-- Faith Weaver (faith-weaver@usa.net), November 03, 1998.

Speaking of Joanne, I heard on CNBC this morning(Nov. 5) that the radar at the Salt Lake City airport went off for one minute yesterday. They lost track of all the planes coming and going. This also happenend in Chicgo recently. I wonder if it's Y2K testing???? OK...so this isn't the Joanne effect, but it sure effected a lot of planes. BZZZZZZZZZZZZ

-- Anti-chainsaw (Tree@hugger.com), November 05, 1998.

The "Joanne Effect" in essence is the theory that accounting programs in general will have failures due to functions that look-ahead to dates after 12/31/1999. The fiscal year manifestation of this is only a subset of the actual phenomenon which has been occurring in many accounting systems already.

It's really an overrated part of the Y2K problem and not deserving of a pretentious special name.

-- Buddy Y. (DC) (buddy@bellatlantic.net), November 05, 1998.

Buddy,

You're absolutely right and it is rather pretentious, but it's so much easier to say than, "the theory that accounting programs in general will have failures due to functions that look-ahead to dates after 12/31/1999. The fiscal year manifestation of this is only a subset of the actual phenomenon which has been occurring in many accounting systems already".

Just like E7 instead of 1110 0111, or 98 instead of 1998.

Hmmmmmm. . .

-- Hardliner (searcher@internet.com), November 05, 1998.

I guess you're right Hardliner. Just like it's easier to say "The Diane Scale" than it is to say "the scale that Buddy Y. suggested in an earlier thread." :)

-- Buddy Y. (DC) (buddy@bellatlantic.net), November 05, 1998.

The JoAnne Effect (I understand she dislikes that designation, BTW) does not apply only to financial systems.

Basically, the gist of the situation is that 1/1/2000 is not the deadline date for Y2K remediation. For any system, the deadline for remediation is the first date that it will process a date value greater than or equal to 1/1/2000. For some systems, that deadline has already come and gone while for many others it is months ahead of 1/1/2000. This is the principle behind the JoAnne effect.

-- Paul Neuhardt (neuhardt@ultranet.com), November 09, 1998.