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Ed Yourdon is the author of two dozen books on mainframe programming. He now warns against the threat of the spread of noncompliant data into compliant machines.
My view: this issue is the Achilles heel of the proposed solutions to y2k. To insure a correction, the corrected computers must cut off all contact with noncompliant computers. This threatens every system -- above all, the international banking system. If most of the computers in any interdependent system are not compliant, the system will cease to be a system, either through reinfection or through quarantine.
The story appeared in COMPUTERWORLD (Oct. 20).
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Most companies are just now figuring out how to coordinate their year 2000 repairs with those done by their suppliers or customers. Unless everyone in the supply chain fixes their systems at the same time, and in the same way, they risk infecting each other with bad data.
Author and industry expert Ed Yourdon pushed that message in a recent presentation in Newton, Mass., sponsored by Cutter Consortium, an information technology advisory firm in Arlington, Mass. Yourdon is chairman of the consortium.
Yourdon told executives that they must stress to senior management that fixing internal systems is only 20% to 40% of fixing the year 2000 problem.
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