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It may take only half a day to fix a corporate desktop computer. But what if the company has 80,000 computers?
The y2k problem is therefore embedded in organizations that are expending most of their y2k resources on fixing mainfrome code.
This is from TECHWEB (May 1).
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Most IT departments -- even those ahead of schedule in resolving mainframe-based year 2000 problems -- are way behind in testing their client/server applications for date bugs, experts said. According to a Computer Intelligence study published last month, almost half of IT managers surveyed said they have initiated "no activity" in resolving the problem on desktop PCs, which means they have not even begun planning a solution.
For most IT managers, the logic is mainframe and other host-oriented problems should be handled first, since they will take longest to fix. "There's this feeling that it might take a year to fix all the problems in a COBOL mainframe, but it only takes half a day to fix a PC," said Leon Kappelman, author of "The Year 2000 Problem: Strategies and Solutions From the Fortune 100." He added, "But if you have 160,000 PCs, that's 80,000 days of work -- a lot more time than you needed to fix the mainframe problems." . . .
In other cases, off-the-shelf packages that claim year 2000 compliance may not meet the user's compliance standards, said Don Henrich, president and CEO of Software Emancipation Technologies, another company that offers desktop remediation products. "Frequently, we find that systems that are supposed to be Y2K compliant are not," he said. "The problem is that most of them are written in C or VisualBasic -- there's no thread you can pull that will show you all the problems."
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