Continuity Planning and the Year 2000

Abstract By now, everyone has heard of the Year 2000 problem or, as those in technology-land more commonly refer to it, Y2K or the Millennium Bug. Simply put, these are general terms for a set of events that may or may not occur as a result of calendars changing to January 1, 2000. The problems originate from computer software and firmware written to recognize only a two-digit year in the date field. These programs could have been written as far back as 20 or 30 years ago or as recently as the 1990s. In and of itself, correcting the problem does not, on the surface, appear to be a daunting task, but the problem runs much deeper than it appears. Even though the problem sounds simple, it is extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive to fix. There are no “silver bullets” or magical technological solutions to the problem. Despite their best efforts, experts agree at varying levels that a significant number of companies will fail to address the problem in time. The potential costs of failure are very high (e...