Millennium muddle is managers? business

Corporate business managers have been handed the responsiblity for year 2000 compliance, as the buck has been passed away from IT staff and resellers.

Speakers at the Software Productivity Group?s Year 2000 Conference and Expo emphasised that unless general business managers are charged with leading systems conversions programmes, their efforts at compliance will be seriously undermined and may ultimately fail.

William Ulrich, president of consultancy Tactical Strategy Group, warned: ?IT people cannot be expected to make strategic business decisions. There are a million and one solutions for the year 2000 problem, but only a few that are appropriate for the business.?

He added: ?Companies must get their business people involved at the up front planning level. Being overly technical is what got us into this mess in the first place. A simple technical problem, had it been addressed years ago, has evolved into a problem of major proportions.?

Thomas Klein, vice president at investment bank JP Morgan in charge of year 2000 programmes, said: ?The solution to this problem needs a partnership of business and IT to prioritise what?s needed to become compliant.?

One of the major issues with the year 2000 problem, according to Klein, is that systems can go wrong without appearing to do so. ?This is not a crash and burn situation in every case,? he warned. Some applications have been downloading data from central systems for years but risk downloading corrupt data.

Ulrich advised that management teams must develop fallback positions and contingency plans to ensure that the business can continue to operate normally.