These organizations, representing more than 2.2 million financial and information technology professionals worldwide, have teamed to alert the business community to the potential impact of the Y2K problem. Mission-critical computer systems worldwide will perform inaccurate calculations or potentially crash if they have not been properly reviewed and updated to account for dates in the year 2000 and beyond. As a result, many organizations may suffer a financial loss, damage their reputation and credibility, and breach relations with customers, employees, investors, trading partners, regulators and other stakeholders. This is an action item for small, medium and large organizations as well as anyone using a personal computer. All senior managers, CIOs, software vendors, process owners, boards of directors, audit committees and world leaders in government bodies need to obtain assurance that the Y2K issue has been addressed internally and with external business and trading partners.
Time is of the essence.
Although the time, personnel and financial resources required to prepare information systems for Y2K can be extensive, the cost of continuing to ignore the problem may be far more devastating. Organizations should allow at least one full year to fix and test code, with many organizations requiring two to four or more years to adequately fix and test their code. These two digits were omitted to conserve memory space and reduce keypunch effort. When the year 2000 arrives, these systems will assume the date is 1900, causing potentially devastating errors, invalid information and system shut downs. Billions of lines of computer code from millions of computer programs may be affected worldwide.