IBIS / Resources / Year 2000

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Resources / Year 2000 / How will it affect you?

The Y2K Problem

Background

How will it affect you?

IBIS Y2K Statement

Web Resources

Y2K in Botswana

How will it affect you?

Your Business -

The impact of such a bug on your day to day business will depend largely on your type of business, but many of the procedures that you already follow to protect yourself against loss of data or file corruption will already be providing you with most of the protection you need.

In determining whether the Y2K bug will affect your business after the end of 1999 you must determine exactly what functions of your business are date dependent. For the majority of businesses in Botswana this will mainly be use of accounting and billing packages. It is important to ensure that your particular accounting programs will allow you to issue invoices correctly, and to correctly credit payments.

Most accounting packages have specific Year 2000 information pages on their web-sites, and any accounting package use is encouraged to visit these pages and check on their own specific versions of their software.

You as a manager -

It is very true that a lot of people are getting rich from the Year 2000 problem, as a manager it is however your responsibility to ensure that your company, (and hence yourself) does not become poorer from it! So before rushing to buy the latest computer hardware and software packages prior to the end of 1999 it is advisable to establish exactly what your business is doing with its date information, and the impact to your own business and to your customers of getting dates wrong.

A lot of people have found that they may be called upon to spend many tens of thousands to fix a problem that would not actually cost them anything if they were to encounter it. Only you, the manager of your business is in a position to make that determination. It is very true that a lot of people are getting rich from the Year 2000 problem, as a manager it is however your responsibility to ensure that your company, (and hence yourself) does not become poorer from it!

Your Equipment -

In many cases electronic equipment already has a Real-Time clock (i.e date/time/calendar) built in. For devices such as video recorders, video cameras, personal organisers etc, this clock is fixed. Some of these items will just not handle dates after 2000, that is not to say they will stop working, just that the date will no longer be correct.

Desk Top computers also have clocks built in, often described as the BIOS clock, older PCs (usually pre 1996 models) often do not have full 4-digit (eg 1999) year counter. It is possible to buy plug-in cards to correct this, in the majority of cases this is not required. In the vast majority of cases if this type of system is critical to the operation of your business you will probably not be using old PC hardware, and hence the advantages of upgrading older systems needs evaluation as any other type of upgrade versus replacement.

Your Software -

The real impact of the Y2K problem will be in how your software handles the date. Even if your PC has a correctly functioning real-time clock, that will give you the right day, year and hour until the year 2099, if the software that is running on the computer does not make proper use of it, then it does not matter how "Y2K Compliant" the PC is, or how many "Y2K certificates" were in the box. Fundamentally the Y2K problem is a software problem.