Euro-conversion and Year 2000: a review of the project situation

In 1999 and 2000, major business events such as European monetary union (EMU) and the Year 2000 problem will force organizations, in those situations where IT is critical to business survival, to set up and adequately fund relevant projects. The ability of the organization's IT departments to deliver timely and appropriate solutions will be critical to those companies. While most companies and governmental organizations can use a period until 2002 to become Euro-compliant, financial industries such as banks especially face an extreme time pressure, since they need to be Euro-compliant by the beginning of 1999. There is no single best technical or business approach to making a system Euro-compliant. Based on the current situation in each organization, companies must choose from a wide range of strategies and approaches with different costs and benefits. Our experiences in Euro projects have shown that the overall goal of a Euro-conversion project is to choose the most appropriate mix of technical and business solutions to implement timely Euro-compliance. Costs have been shown to be of minor importance in this context.