There is no question the money had to be spent. The frustration, said Wallace Chief Executive and President Robert Cronin, is that the investment merely maintains the status quo. Given the universal nature of the Year 2000, or Y2K problem, few technology issues rival its high profile. The irony for computer gurus is that fixing the way computers handle dates is a cinch compared with an actual software bug. With dates, programmers can easily define the nature of their problem.
Most true bugs require significant detective work to determine both the cause and the solution.
What complicates the problem, however, are the very things that have driven some of the most important computer-generated productivity gains. The computing world is more connected than ever. Corporations have trimmed costs and accelerated decision making by sharing their data with customers and suppliers. As such, a company's Year 2000 strategy may be only as good as the weakest link in its computing chain. As an extra measure of protection, Wallace set up a buffer system for its computers that sifts through data from outside sources to ensure it can distinguish dates regardless of the century.