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Half the blue chip businesses in Europe have made no meaningful y2k repair progress. A Gartner Group spokesman says that panic will hit European business managers in the next few months.
Well, maybe. But if awareness is this low this late, what will speed it up later this year? I think it will take a major y2k-related failure -- a representative failure -- to wake up the sleepwalkers. People this deep into denial are not easy to awaken.
This is from COMPUTERWEEKLY (April 22).
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Gartner Group year 2000 expert Andy Kite warned yesterday that millennium bug panic will spread through European businesses and public sector organisations in the next few months. . . .
"Year 2000 is not a future event - there are computer systems that are failing already. The big event will be the beginning of January 1999 when we will see a great deal more systems failing - public sector in particular. I'm flabbergasted at their lack of action. When they do wake up, the panic will be heard through the whole industry." . . .
Meanwhile, the latest compliance figures for European blue chip companies from Gartner Group show that 50% have made no meaningful progress towards fixing their IT systems for the year 2000.
The figures show that only 3% of European companies are fully compliant while a further 5% have fixed their mission-critical systems. Twenty per cent have a plan covering the risks and costs and 22% have begun collecting inventory. Gartner analyst Ben Pring said he believed the situation was probably a best case scenario: "Companies have a tendency to be over optimistic," he said.
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