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In hearings on November 4 to the House Subcommittee on Technology, a representative of the Gartner Group warned that American businesses are way behind. Gartner had prediucted 30% would be compliant in 1997. Not now. Gartner now predicts that 50% of all organizations will not be compliant in their mission-critical functions by the deadline to begin testing in 1998.
Note: This means that all the hype about being ready for testing in December of 1998 is nonsense. Even if 50% make it -- a matter of faith ("the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen") -- the other 50% will not. When will the latter do their testing? If the initial code repair creates problems -- if!!! -- or total failure, how will they have time to repair the repair and test again?
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While pessimism is often equated with hype, we have certainly become more pessimistic during the past year. User data in 1996 indicated that many organizations were planning to begin their efforts to remove year 2000 exposure in 1997. Therefore, we believed at the time that perhaps 30 percent of all organizations would be compliant by year-end 1997. Unfortunately, the volume of initial and estimating inquiries (some from the same organizations as in 1996), lead us to believe that while organizations were certainly aware of the problem, and some even completed high-level assessments, many, if not most, were not translating initial work into progress up the COMPARE scale.
Therefore, our estimates must necessarily reflect that lack of progress. As of this writing, we believe that many organizations will make significant progress in 1997 and 1998, resulting in 50 percent Level IV compliance by year-end 1998. That is the good news. The bad news is that the remaining one of two organizations will be noncompliant in their mission-critical assets, with time horizons to failure rapidly approaching.
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