(For educational/research purposes only)

http://www.globetechnology.com/gam/Y2K/19990624/RMILL.html

Large firms slow to kill tough Y2K bug

SIMON TUCK Technology Reporter Thursday, June 24, 1999

Ottawa -- Canada's bid to exterminate the millennium bug may be taking longer than expected, according to a Statistics Canada survey released yesterday.

The survey, the federal agency's third major study of Canada's progress on the Y2K front, found that fewer than half of the large companies that had expected to be finished assessing, fixing and testing their computer systems by the start of this year had achieved that.

This time last year, a Statscan survey found that 42 per cent of large Canadian businesses (those with more than 250 employees) expected to have their computer systems prepared for the new millennium by the end of December, 1998.

But the latest survey, conducted through February and March, found that big businesses had largely missed that goal: Only 18 per cent said they would be ready by the end of April.

And a bare majority, 52 per cent felt they would be ready by the end of June, six months after the original goal.

Chris Johnston, one of the authors of the report, said it provides both good and bad news. The fact that companies may have been too optimistic about how easily they'd be able to get ready for the millennium is reason for concern, he said, but only 2 per cent of large companies said their systems had revealed "many more problems" than had been expected.

Mr. Johnston said he's worried that Corporate Canada may be getting overly confident about Y2K. "The danger is that if they stop working so hard now, maybe down the road they'll find they missed some things."

Statscan is considering conducting a fourth study that would be released in September. That would provide a clearer picture of Canadian readiness for the new year, Mr. Johnston said, because it would be closer to when most organizations expected to be finished their preparations.

The millennium bug could prompt computer systems to go haywire when the date changes from 1999 to 2000, creating confusion in older programs that used only the last two digits to keep track of the year.

Help & Contact Us Copyright ) 1999 Globe Information Services

-- (fake@out.com), June 24, 1999

Answers

(1) Companies MUST exude positive news about their Y2K compliance. If not, they will be killed in the stock market.

(2) The amount of slippage, the current level of compliance (not projected to some future date), and the historical timeliness of large software maintenance projects leads to a less encouraging outlook than the article projects.

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), June 25, 1999.

Does anyone have a link to this most recent survey?

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), June 25, 1999.