11 August 1998

PC Misconceptions May Damage Y2K Clean Up

The following article is excerpted from "ITAA's Year 2000 Outlook", volume 3, no. 30, 7 August 1998.

Where in the world is Karl Feilder? Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seattle, Toronto, London, Johannesburg. These are just names on a well-thumbed calendar to this man on a mission. The former C programmer is an advisor to governments, a frequent conference speaker, and an entrepreneur. And he has made a business of knowing more about the impact of Y2K on PC's and PC software than anybody else. That knowledge has put Feilder into his global orbit.

Feilder is president of Greenwich Mean Time, a firm he started in 1995. Greenwich Mean Time software tools help companies determine whether they have Y2K problems with their PC's or PC software.

Misconception number one is that Y2K is a mainframe matter, and that date handling problems at the desktop will not be painful. Greenwich Mean Time believes there are roughly 430 million PC's in use around the world today. The firm cites Gartner Group research claiming that 64 per cent of mission critical applications reside on PC's. According to Feilder, date deficiencies could lurk in the PC BIOS, operating system, applications, data or interfaces between programs.

Misconception number two is that late model PC's are probably Y2K OK. Feilder's firm has tested 500 machines for Y2K compliance. Ninety-three per cent of those manufactured prior to 1997 failed the examination. Forty-seven per cent of those PC's produced in the first half of 1997 tanked the test and 21 per cent of those built in the second half of last year still had problems. The good news is that the fail rate is headed in the right direction; the bad news is that, according to Feilder, 11 per cent of PC's built in the first half of this year were still tripped up by a couple of zeros.

A third misconception is that Y2K will not bug most PC software. In fact, Greenwich Mean Time takes issue with 64 per cent of the PC software titles it has tested (now over 5,000 programs). Feilder says 28 per cent of this date-challenged software is called Y2K compliant by manufacturers....

Perhaps that is why Feilder views the Y2K compliance landscape in shades of gray. "Some [PC programs] are more problematic than others", Feilder says, noting this his company has defined 73 categories of risk for this type of software. The top five most frequent glitches include incompatible date windowing formats, licensed background applications which lock up when the date is advanced, behind the screen date manipulation, leap year calculations, and programs which flat out can't handle a year 2000 date.

Of course, companies can't fix computer resources they do not know they have in inventory. Take the example of one large bank Fielder and company have assisted. This particular institution tallied its PC-installed base at 63,000 units. Greenwich Mean Time found 110,000 such devices.... Feilder's firm ra a test of just 10 PC's at one cellular phone manufacturer and identified 37 unauthorized software programs....

For many organizations, PC's may be the Achilles heel of the data centre-ic Y2K remediation program. Feilder says firms don't know what software and data has been delegated to the desktop or how it is used. "People have lost track", he claims, noting that some companies allow their employees to buy computers on credit cards.

Greenwich Mean Time's took Check 2000, helps companies figure out what they have in operation, along with which hardware, operating systems, software and data files may be impacted by the century rollover.