The technical staff can make a database approach sound tougher than an insurance renewal after a class-action lawsuit.
Most risk managers can focus on a few basic topics in reviewing their own RMIS date exposures.
These topics include how dates are stored, reported, calculated and processed over in-house systems. The ideal situation is when the overall process of planning for four-digit years or Year 2000 issues was anticipated in the core architecture of the program. Many newer RMIS since 1996 have that potential benefit. However, many older programs that do not store a physical date in the database depend on the database to interpret a stored variable that is used at run time. These older programs often can have a Year 2000 date exposure, as the year is assumed to be 19XX or is calculated as a certain number of days past a 19XX date.