Y2K: the $1 trillion foul-up

The last numbers expressed to assess the cost of the Y2K remediation effort were in the $600 Million ballpark. These numbers were supposedly accurate of December 1999. Well, 12 months later I think its safe to say that those numbers are low-ball. Through this year companies the world over have been finding the folly of repairing dated, worthless systems, just because they had left things too late; finding that simply fixing dates did nothing but exascerbate existing data problems; and finding that paying Y2K specialists for the honor of fixing these new Y2K related problems was even less efficient than the origonal Y2K efforts were.

We will have frittered away a vast fortune on Y2K work (which should never been allowed to happen), the monies so spent are going to be very hard to replace and this may well be a contributing factor to the current malais that is spreading through the US economy.

Saving Junk

I hate to be a "I told You So" type of person, but this is one I cannot resist. I had to endure three years of Y2K specialists preaching to all that would listen, that they could cure the ills of any program - and man. It was technobabble of the worst sort, it hood- winked honest businesses out of billions of dollars because the regular replacement processes were hijacked by these 20th Century Carpetbaggers. Do I make my self plain? These practitioners were thieves.

The problem was that many programs were at the end of their worthwhile lives, they needed to be replaced. Y2K was a perfect excuse to replace probably 50% of all code, instead it was patched. There were applications that were simply old and worn-out, applications that no longer matched what the business was doing; applications that didn't do anything - they were just dinasuars that no one had deleted, and there were applications that were in need of vastly updated technology to be of use to the company. Y2K fixes did not address the more pernicious issues that surround application development, and so Billions were squandered trying to cure problems that were not solveable in such a simple minded manner. Now, I have to say that the problem was not just overzealous Y2K practitioners, companies didn't help themselves in these situations, by leaving so little time to make strategic decisions they were forced in to making stupid decisions.

Now, 12 months on, we are finding out that many of the 'saved' programs are failing, corrupting their databases with ill- conceived corrections; applications that have been using obselete technology are finally to be replaced because the fixes made to them have made them too unreliable for further use. It was not rocket science that got us here, it was simple stupidity.

The Repercusions

Having frittered away close to a trillion dollars, Corporations have had to scale back all manner of activities. These have included the purchase of new software, the development of new applications and the hiring of new employees; and this just on the MIS side of things. The bloated MIS bugdets required for the Y2K effort hamstrung all other aspects of corporate life, reducing the funds available for a whole raft of initiatives and operational needs. The impact of this is now being felt. The IT industry is facing its own kind of Nuclear Winter, and the economy in general is suffering from a severe lack of funds and high interest rates. The rapacious spending now has its own New Years hangover.

What Have We Learnt

Very little, I suspect. A lot of technology people get wealthy in the short term; companies stemmed the need to replace moribund systems one more year... Not much for all that money.

We ended up finding that The Net was an economic means to provide applications, yet the features available are related to the low cost - a user interface straight from the 1960's. Client/Server was a tough technology to implement, but the architecture now driving scaleable Internet systems on the web is... Client/Server.

ERP was a solution to a problem no one had. Now the buyers of this technology are fighting to make the complex messes these systems have introduced work for them, hoping that the effort is worth it. Bought to rapidly replace systems that had no hope of being Y2K compliant, ERP proved to need far too much customization to be implemented in the manner needed, in the time available. Complexity has its limits.

Conclusions

Corporations will have to rationalize the systems they wish to implement, they have to do this because the next few years will be tough; technology got us into a hole, it will not be capable of getting us out of it. That rationalization will probably continue the march companies have started to implementing internet and intranet systems, the cost of doing otherwise will be prohibitive. The technical opportunities thrown aside in this period will be staggering, we will be a poorer industry for corporation's choices made as a result of our, the IT industry's, greed and stupidity.