"A company with 50 or more employees is likely to have a PBX, and that can cost $50,000 to $60,000 to upgrade," says Yourdon. For that reason most small companies upgrade as infrequently as they can--and consequently may find themselves five or six very expensive versions away from Y2K compliance.
Companies with home-grown programs face the arduous task of combing their code for dates and fixing them manually, after which everything must be tested again. Although a number of tools automate part of that process for COBOL, none of the experts we interviewed could name more than one or two that tackle Visual Basic, a popular programming language among many small companies. (There are a few tools for C and C++, but none of them are cheap.)
Nor can you count on outside help. "Consultants aren't going to come knocking on your door," says de Jager. "A consultant is better served by going after a Fortune 2,000 company because that company has a larger problem and a larger cost of fixing it, and therefore the consultant can make more."
If fixing the code yourself proves too daunting--or if it was written in primordial times by someone long gone and it can't be deciphered--it's probably best to do some bullet biting and invest in a packaged product. Another factor to consider when making that decision: the Emerging Issues Task Force of the Financial Accounting Standards Board ruled in July 1996 that any money a company spends modifying its own code to deal with Y2K complications comes right off the bottom line.
The cost for all this ranges from a few days' time spent calling vendors and checking machines--if everything is fine--to $100,000 or more if everything must go. That prospect may tempt you to relegate the problem to the grease-stained ledge behind the back burner. But if you do, "you're giving up responsibility for managing your systems in the year 2000," says de Jager.
That's an abdication your customers may be unwilling to accept. Increasingly, large companies are trying to enforce Y2K compliance on their small suppliers. The big three automakers, for example, have created a Y2K-compliance definition and checklist that suppliers are being asked to fill out and return. (It's available on the Web at www.aiag.org.)
Meanwhile, according to a recent article in the British publication Computer Weekly, telecommunications giant British Telecom has a color-coded system for rating suppliers' preparedness. Companies coded red are in danger of getting the boot.
At Mack Trucks Inc., in Allentown, Pa., year 2000 project manager Barry Sine recently sent letters to all business-unit heads asking them to check their own suppliers' status. Enclosed with each of Sine's cover letters were two others: one from Mack to the supplier and one from Mack's legal department to the supplier's legal department. "We say that Mack considers this very serious and ask them, 'Where do you guys stand?" says Sine. "'Are you working on it? What are you doing? If you don't have it fixed, when do you plan to have it fixed?"
The letters also urge the companies--which service Mack directly--to contact their own suppliers, "all the way down to mom and pop," says Sine. "Even Harry working in his garage with one PC needs to give a darn."
Mack's letters are mostly informational, but embedded in at least one paragraph is the hint of a stick: "In our view, failure on the part of any company to prepare for and resolve year 2000 failures constitutes negligence and, as with all acts of negligence, exposes the negligent party to claims for damages. Mack will not hesitate to aggressively prosecute year 2000 system-failure-related claims."
That kind of warning may bring home to some small companies the fact that fixing Y2K problems is an inevitability that cannot be postponed. "This is a fixed deadline for everybody," says David Eddy, president of Software Sales Group Inc., in Wellesley, Mass., and a self-proclaimed year 2000 alarmist. "No small or large company has ever experienced a fixed deadline. People say tax deadlines are fixed, but if you don't pay your taxes, do you suddenly go poof on April 16?
"With this," Eddy says, "you'll go poof."
Leigh Buchanan is the editor of Inc. Technology.
RESOURCES
The Web is rife with year 2000 material. Check out www.inc.com/technov97 for Inc.'s library of relevant links. The following books are also available from Amazon.com and other retailers:
- Managing '00: Surviving the Year 2000 Computing Crisis, by Peter de Jager and Richard Bergeon (John Wiley & Sons, 1997). User-friendly reading--a nice combination of managerial strategies and brass tacks (including a rundown on Y2K tools).
- Solving the Year 2000 Problem, by James Edward Keogh and Stephen C. Ruten (Academic Press Professional, 1997). The bad things that can happen to good systems plus a five-step plan.
- The Year 2000 Problem Solver: A Five-Step Disaster Prevention Plan, by Bryce Ragland (Computing McGraw-Hill, 1996). The five steps in question are based on the U.S. Air Force's approach to solving its Y2K problem. Includes some information on small- and home-business issues.
- The Year 2000 Software Systems Crisis: Challenge of the Century, by William M. Ulrich and Ian S. Hayes (Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference, 1997). A good tool for figuring out what the Millennium Bug may do to your organization.
