Millenium Crunch: Y2K's Unexpected Benefits

January 4, 1999

Behind the News:
Y2K's Unexpected Benefits

Please Note: This article first appeared in InformationWeek, January 4, 1999, issue 715, pg. 94.

The world will be spared much pain as a result of a recent United Nations meeting of year 2000 coordinators from more than 120 countries. The attendees listened to reports on the Y2K date-field problem's potential effects
on electricity and energy, telecommunications and satellites, nuclear plants and weapons systems, maritime and air transportation, financial systems and central banks, and contingency planning.
Then the coordinators went to work. They formed regional committees, set goals, agreed to share information, and planned regional meetings for the next quarter and another general meeting for mid-1999. "Never before in the
history of the U.N. has so much been done in one day," said Ahmad Kamal, the U.N. ambassador from Pakistan who chaired the one-day session.
Although many of the delegates were newly appointed and newly aware of the threat posed by the Y2K bug, all went home part of a global, albeit informal, year 2000 task force. They also helped set a precedent for global cooperation on future IT issues.
The meeting grew from a letter that Rep. Steve Horn, R-Calif., wrote to the U.N. concerning the potential global impact of the Y2K problem. Taking his cue from that letter, Kamal helped formulate a U.N. resolution, passed in June 1998, calling for every country to appoint a year 2000 coordinator. Then the effort received backing from the staff of John Koskinen, chairman of the Clinton administration's council on the year 2000, and financing from the
World Bank.
Although the meeting wasn't the best possible way to address the global scale of the Y2K problem, it was probably the best we could hope for, given the lack of top management leadership from government, business, and the IT industry regarding this issue. The Y2K war effort is short on generals, but there are, fortunately, many committed guerrilla teams on the front lines-which is far better than nothing.
The success of the U.N. meeting got me thinking about unexpected benefits that can result from any Y2K project. Here are some areas in which companies can see payoffs.
- Assets: Y2K projects help companies get a good handle on their information assets, positioning them for better management of hardware, software, data, and interfaces.
- People: A successful Y2K project requires mastery of many people skills. These are ever valuable for recruiting, organizing, and motivating strong teams.
- Practices and experience: Success with an enormous and complicated reengineering project helps establish good, repeatable processes for change management and version control. This will help companies deal with other
projects.
- Attitude: The IT group can gain confidence and credibility by meeting an urgent business need on deadline.
- Knowledge: Solving the Y2K problem requires increased communication and cooperation, giving everyone a better sense of how IT aligns with and supports the rest of the enterprise.
Taken together, the benefits of completing a Y2K project set your organization up for some positive advantages. It's an opportunity to improve relationships with customers and suppliers, capture market share, buy up assets at fire-sale prices, and initiate new competitive IT projects. With a year to go, there's still much to do to reduce damage, expedite recovery, and improve processes. The job will be painful, but there's much good that can
result.
At the reception that followed the U.N. conference, one staffer from the U.S. mission told me that it can take up to five years to organize a U.N. meeting-but the Y2K event took only about 10 weeks.
Threats like war and Y2K can bring out the best in people.

Professor Leon A. Kappelman is an associate professor of Business Computer Information System in the College of Business Administration at the University of North Texas. He is also an associate director of the Center for Quality and Productivity at the University of North Texas and co-chair of the Society for Information Management's Year 2000 Working Group. He can be reached at kapp@unt.edu

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