There are so many variables. I don t want to be one of those people crying wolf, but there is no doubt now that there will be failures. It s a game of Russian roulette. Ross also sees Y2K fixers getting smarter and faster. After years of working with this, our AI systems and the people who run them have become much more efficient.
Triage selecting mission-critical systems to fix first is the strategy of choice today.
If you asked the average CEO how many square feet of real property the company owned, he could call someone and have the answer for you pretty quickly. Chou sees new careers opening up in the field, not just temporary jobs fixing the year 2000 problem, but a whole transformational enterprise section. There will be a new category called transformation engineer. For the most part, according to Ross and others, emergency funds are coming out of other IT projects rather than being added to the total budget. At the present pace, he says the chances that Y2K-caused global system failures will trigger a deep recession are 60 percent.