Most major corporations have previously stated that their systems would be compliant by the end of this year and they would have a whole year to test before 2000. Has anyone seen any company state that their systems have been remediated? You would think that someone would have met the target.

-- Rick Reilly (rreilly@home.com), December 17, 1998

Answers

Rick, my feeling is that you're going to see a whole lot of panic on Wall Street as these deadlines slip.

They were a PR tool.

Mike ====================================================================

-- Michael Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), December 17, 1998.

I suppose they've got a few days left...

It was only wishful thinking from the start.

-- Richard Dale (rdale@figroup.co.uk), December 17, 1998.

in my company we have the date of 12-31-1998 to be done with all our testing... My team can't finish our testing because we are dependant on two other groups that haven't finished... But management is sugar-coating everything and we are getting sign-off anyway.. because of this all important corporate goal. once again saving face seems to be more important then actually fixing the problem..

-- dr death (death@death.com), December 17, 1998.

Same pattern as always. Same pattern I expected from reading Yourdon's previous software management/troubleshooting/debugging books. When they began finding out that they needed to set a schedule, 'finishing" by 12/31/1999 seemed like a simple politically correct way for Y2K managers (program managers and general business managers) to project a long-lead time date that was would "appear" safe to outside observers. Also, these mid-level and senior managers "knew" that they would miss this date, would exceed budget, and would have unexpected project growth.

So setting a "too-be-missed" deadline this early means they had a schedule they could send to outsiders who who get distracted and not follow up. Once the deadline was set (and missed), they (the working programmers) could keep editing code without having to go to plannig meeting to talk about missing schedules.

Unfortunately, this artificially early schedule date means real corrections and testing will be occuring between March and July-August-Sept of 1999. So it makes it even more difficult for any top-level company (Ford, GM, Chrysler, IH, Rolls-Royce, Toyoto, whoever) to figure out what will really be happening in their supply chain (up and down).

Not all companies are the size of Chase-Manhatten or Sears. So it takes a shorter amount of time fix a smaller company, and the national impact is less if something fails in a small company. But everything Sears sells is made by somebody else, shipped to Sears warehouses by somebody else, stored, and bought by somebody else who works at somebody else's business.

-- Robert A. Cook, P.E. (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), December 17, 1998.

How soon will the next round of quarterly SEC 10-Q filings be submitted? At least in some of them, there might be clues to progress.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 17, 1998.

Well here we are, January 28. Anyone has a list of companies that met their stated deadlines of Dec. '98 for compliancy/done with remediations? Every major company ,utility and government agencies have said Dec. '98 they will be compliant or done with remediation and leaving all of '99 for testing. Thousands of them. Surely they're happy to report that they have met their schedules, anyone has done a research on that lately?

-- Chris (catsy@pond.com), January 28, 1999.