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What astounds me is that experts are still telling organizations, "You had better start now!" Why bother to tell them? For years, senior managers have been told this, and they have not responded with money. Yet nothing bad has happened. Managers can still find an occasional report by some programmer that "it's all hype." That's what managers listen to because that's what they want to hear. They are deaf to really bad news, which the experts also dismiss as "doom and gloom," which isn't respectable. The experts want to keep therir respectability, and the managers want to defer spending money. This is the dialogue of the deaf.
The warnings continue. The average cost of a large repair is estimated at $25 million if they start now; double this if they wait. None of this has fazed the vast majority of managers.
They are warned that outside programmers will not be available at the end of the third quarter of 1998? This is another way of saying that most businesses are not expected to get rolling on their y2k projects until late in the second half of 1998 -- way, way late for a project that costs $25 milion today.
And so it goes. The experts say, "You had better start soon," and the managers responding, "That's what you told me a year ago."
When will this dialogue of the deaf end? My guess: no earlier than September 9, 1999.
This is from INFOWORLD (Jan. 5).
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The average large company is expected to spend a big chunk of its 1998 information technology budgets on year-2000 compliance.. . .
"What we're seeing is that as people have gotten serious about year 2000, they are scrounging for cash, and essentially all projects except the one or two that make a strategic difference are stopped," said Bruce Stewart, an analyst at the Gartner Group, in Stamford, Conn. . . .
The major issue surrounding IT investment decisions is money. In the Cutter Consortium's survey of 150 IT professionals, the average cost of respondents' companies' year-2000 budgets in 1997 was $25 million. The number is expected to double in 1998, Yourdon said. . . .
One ramification of this shift of resources to year-2000 compliance projects is likely to be a slowdown in the desktop and networking markets dominated by Microsoft, Lotus, Novell, and Netscape. The markets will not evaporate, but as funding for discretionary projects dries up, it will become increasingly hard for vendors to sell, Gartner Group's Stewart said. . . .
Investments IT managers said they will be making this year include installations of year-2000-compliant packaged applications from the likes of SAP, Baan, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards, and anything else that absolutely makes or breaks a company's business. . . .
"By the end of third quarter this year, there will be no third-party resources available to take on the year-2000 problem for you," Colony said. "So make sure you lock in third-party help now, or the resources in new development will have to be pulled in to fix the year-2000 problem."
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