The 'Millennium Bug': its origin, potential impact and possible solutions

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, computer programmers commonly identified each calendar year by its last two digits to save internal memory and disk space . However, this practice has made it impossible to identify the year 2000: computers reading only the last two digits of the year will either treat it as 1900 or shut down completely. The potential consequences can be catastr ophic, given that a high proportion of the world's essential services are n ow controlled by computers. This is known as the 'Year 2000 (Y2K) problem', or the 'Millennium Bug'. Many of the bug's effects are already being felt today. Eradicating the bug involves not only many complex technical problem s but also numerous practical constraints and operational difficulties. It requires the full involvement of top management and has to be addressed at the strategic level. The effort to solve this problem is now seriously behi nd schedule, and urgent action is needed to recover the lost ground. Howeve r, this is happening against a background of limited IT resources and an ev er-increasing demand on IT staff in most organisations. The purpose of this paper is to describe the Year 2000 problem and explore its potential scale and impact if not resolved in time. From an information management perspec tive, the complex program coding options and techniques and software tools needed to resolve the problem will also be reviewed, and some relevant mana gement and organisational issues will be discussed. An important lesson fro m this is that some decisions may seem 'rational' under the circumstances o f a particular period, but when the circumstances change, these decisions c an have profound, unintentional, long-term consequences. Therefore, rationa l decision making must take into account not only the pros and cons of the decision for the current period, but also for the long term. (C) 1999 Elsev ier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.