November 9, 1998 Behind the News:  Last Chance For Y2K Candor  With no more legal roadblocks for not disclosing information about the year 2000 problem, vendors will be expected to tell the truth. By Leon A. Kappelman

Please Note:   This article first appeared in InformationWeek, November 9, 1998, issue 708.  pg. 106.

t's comforting to know Superman always tells the truth. Wouldn't it be nice if the same could be said about software, hardware, and other high-tech companies? It would surely simplify the work of year 2000 program directors, enterprise contingency planners, and emergency preparedness managers.

The federal government has given the high-tech mainstays of the information age what may be their last chance for self-motivated changes, before the repercussions of the year 2000 problem manifest as externally imposed changes of the other kind--you know, legislative and regulatory. This last chance is called the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act of 1998.

Before the act became law, experts and government agencies reported about one-third of high-tech vendors were silent on the year 2000 issue, another third provided incorrect information about their products, and the remaining third gave valid and useful information.

Besides suspending antitrust restrictions on industries and facilitating other year 2000-related information sharing (ideas I first suggested in a letter to the editor in InformationWeek in February 1997), the act has a provision that I hope becomes known as the "Superman Clause."

Since it remains to be seen how high-tech companies will behave, I also think of this as the "Y2K Last-Chance Clause." It may be the last chance high-tech companies have to become candid corporate citizens independently.

The layman's view is that the last-chance clause relieves the maker of responsibility for the accuracy of a designated "Year 2000 Readiness Disclosure Statement." Be the statement true or false, it does not matter unless one can prove that making it was a criminally fraudulent behavior. Statements made after Jan. 1, 1996, are eligible for this legal protection.

Yes, the industry that brought us "vaporware" is now legally protected from lying about the year 2000 problem. Thus, the software company that today tells us its upgrades are fine--when, in fact, the new versions are just as date-broken as the old versions--can be protected from their statements' being used against them as evidence. The law similarly protects me, and others, from liability if we divulge the names of the companies doing this.

Remarkable as all this sounds, Congress unanimously approved the bill without debate and President Clinton signed it into law. And nobody asked a year 2000 program director what they thought of it.

During an after-lunch discussion session, I asked 150 or so year 2000 program directors what they wanted from their vendors now that there were no more legal excuses for not telling everyone everything they wanted to know about the year 2000 status of high-tech products. It was almost funny, but more so sadly eerie, when

I asked the question "What do you want from your vendors?" and at least 50 voices said in unison "the truth." More specifically, these high-tech customers, whom the law intended to help, ask that their vendors please provide them with details regarding:

• the definitions and processes used to achieve and determine the compliance status of products.
• the actual tests performed, particularly which dates and time periods were actually tested. They would like to see the test results also, please, as well as the details on the testing environments and platforms utilized.
• the actual code coverage achieved in year 2000 testing (i.e., what percentage of the total possible paths were tested?).

The ball is in the high-tech vendors' court now. I hope the other two-thirds of them begin to act like good citizens too, and join the never-ending fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

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

©  This article is Copyright 1998 InformationWeek and CMP Media.
All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.

 

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