Most of these companies are small or one person operations who may not have a huge reliance on computers and networks - 50 percent of them only employ up to four people.

"However, no business is an island," he added, underlining the importance of supply chain assessments and Y2K contingency plans for every company.

Meanwhile, medium and large businesses, along with government and essential infrastructure, is performing well, according to the report. Thirty five percent of all businesses undertaking Y2K work had completed it by June and 84 percent said they expect to complete work by September

-- y2k dave (xsdaa111@hotmail.com), September 06, 1999

Answers

Standing by itself, this statistic is frightening. But the underlying details are more reassuring the closer you look at them. Many (much more than half?) of these companies have no jurisdiction over any code at all -- they didn't write any, they can't modify any. Within this group, perhaps half don't even use a computer at all, and the other half uses one PC with packaged software. There may be compliant upgrades for this software, which may or may not solve potential problems (depending on how the small business uses the software).

For businesses of this size, someone (Gartner? SBA?) recently did a survey (whatever that's worth, of course) and found that the median small business became compliant for under $1000 and under 3 hours of effort -- mostly buying and installing upgrades/patches.

Still, this is going to leave some unknown percentage that *will* suffer significant y2k bugs, about which they did nothing. But most of *them* can conduct business without any computer at all in a pinch. And nearly all of them can burn some midnight oil performing belated upgrades and damage control. The real bottom line here is that for small businesses, the computer is a convenience, while for large businesses it's a necessity. Small businesses can do without their computers indefinitely in most cases, while large companies will quickly die totally.

What this 44% statistic doesn't say is that these businesses aren't entirely clueless. Many of them have actually done cursory assessments and decided they don't *need* to do anything, or can't because they have no computerized anything.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 06, 1999.

I live in Australia and I know of several companies that have said they are fully Y2K compliant when they are actually not compliant.

One of them has about 15 employees, replaced the hardware for two computers. Never checked software, never fixed the other computers (486's some of them) and never checked anything else. They are proudly saying to all and sundry that they are compliant.

Another company is the one I work for, I've been secretly checking and fixing things without management knowing. However since the beginning of the year management has been proclaiming that we are Y2K compliant. I can tell you we are not.

There are other businesses that I know of and what systems they have, only around one in ten may be actually compliant.

Regards, Simon

-- Simon Richards (simon@wair.com.au), September 06, 1999.

Simon:

That's always the other side of the coin. Of the 56% who say they're doing something or are OK, how many arent't?

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 06, 1999.

Did anyone get an actual link to work on this one? Might you repost the link as just a link, Dave, rather than your entire post?

-- Anita (spoonera@msn.com), September 06, 1999.

Link

-- y2k dave (xsdaa111@hotmail.com), September 07, 1999.