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System failures due to y2k are rising fast. They are expected to keep rising.
An increasing number of failures will create fire drill conditions in corporate IT departments. All right, I'll say it: Chinese fire drills. (Red alert! Red alert! Not politically correct.) Until now, all public discussions have implicitly assume that internal operations will be smooth while the corrections are taking place. This assumption is naive. Computer systems will get more and more chaotic as 2000 approaches.
This is from INFORMATIONWEEK (April 16).
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The temperature is rising on year 2000 problems. The number of failures related to the date change is skyrocketing, disputes with vendors are increasingly bitter, wages are soaring, new costs are being uncovered, and time has already run out for some companies.
Results of two surveys released last week show how the crisis is worsening. The proportion of companies reporting year 2000-related failures rose fivefold between December and March, soaring to 37 percent from 7 percent, according to a survey of 128 U.S. companies by IT services firm Cap Gemini America. Gartner Group, which surveyed 6,000 companies and government bodies worldwide, concludes that the percentage likely to experience failures of critical systems has surged to between 30 percent and 50 percent, up from 10 percent a year ago.
Because of such failures and related year 2000 costs, Gartner says there's a 70 percent chance of a global economic downturn. "There will be an economic effect," says Lou Marcoccio, the advisory firm's research director for application-development methods and management.
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