Year 2000 Compliance: A Guide to Successful Implementation

CTR's new 229-page report explores the impact the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem will have on organizations around the globe. The report is a step-by-step guide designed to help businesses develop and implement a Y2K plan, offering an easy-to-follow five-phase solution that addresses assessment, design strategy, change implementation, testing, and integration.

The year 2000 Crisis Defined

The Year 2000 (Y2K) date-change problem stems from the fact that today's legacy systems store dates in a six-digit format. Because this allows only two digits to represent the year, computers cannot distinguish between 1997 and 2097. When the clock changes to January 1, 2000, the computer will read the year as 1900 and produce erroneous data and numerous mathematical miscalculations.

CTR's Year 2000 Compliance: A Guide to Successful Implementation report explores the impact this problem will have on organizations around the world. Organizations that rely heavily on information systems to conduct business must expedite full scale Y2K migration efforts immediately.

The report explains why the Y2K crisis is more than a maintenance issue. It will affect business operations and the viability of the enterprise, both in the short and long term.

The report provides answers to critical Y2K questions, including: What impact will the Y2K problem have on your organization? What is the extent of the problem? How do you manage a Y2K project? How can you get funding to help solve the Y2K problem? How do you get management and user support? What needs to be done, and how do you get started?

Planning for the Year 2000

The Year 2000 Compliance: A Guide to Successful Implementation report is a critical resource for IT managers who are responsible for solving their company's date-change problems.

This report is a step-by-step guide designed to help organizations develop and implement a Y2K plan. It offers an easy-to-follow five phase solution that covers assessment, design strategy, change implementation, testing, and integration.

Every aspect of the Y2K problem is explored in detail including estimating the cost of fixing the problem, training and staff, forming a testing strategy, and getting programs corrected and operational.

The report also discusses outsourcing as an option to fixing the problem. A company's computer system, even if Y2K compliant, may fail to process, produce error messages, or generate incorrect data if the company receives contaminated programs or data from third-party suppliers or business partners who are not Y2K compliant. Everyone who exchanges information with the company must be considered when implementing a Y2K conversion plan.

The Year 2000 Conversion Process

One of the major aspects of the Y2K crisis is change implementation. This phase, also referred to as the conversion, deals with actually upgrading and changing the affected code. CTR's new report includes important information on automating the conversion process, evaluating the data conversion tools, prioritizing the most critical business applications, and considering traditional conversion solutions, such as date expansion and date compression.

Year 2000 Compliance: A Guide to Successful Implementation also includes an extensive assessment of Y2K software tools and outsourcing services, valuable Y2K case studies, and a listing of Y2K articles, books, and Web sites to further assist in the conversion process. The legal issues associated with the Y2K problem are also discussed.

The Y2K conversion process is labor-intensive and requires a great deal of planning, resources, and time. Organizations must realize the size and scope of the date-change problem and begin to implement a plan now if they are to make a successful transition into the next century.