To this end, the awareness phase of this document offers some guidance and examples from those who have been through it. There are several key areas which must be examined in defining the Y2k problem. The first is time. There are two very different reasons why this is true. The first is that many systems will fail before January 1, 2000.
Many systems make projections or calculations for one or more years into the future.
They experienced failures in the systems which calculated long-term loans and insurance policies. The second reason why time is so critical is that identifying every occurrence of a Y2k problem in a system is very time-consuming. Making an individual Y2K fix doesn't take long, but there may be many to make. Another aspect of Y2K is that commercial hardware and software are affected as well as application software. Such things generally fall outside the responsibility of the information technology community, but someone needs to evaluate and address them.