ts not issued, payroll and social service checks not cut, personnel, medical and academic records malfunctioning, errors in banking and finance, accounts not paid or received, inventory not maintained, weapon systems malfunctioning; the list goes on. It is highly unlikely that an individual will be unaffected by Y2K. The Gartner Group, a product development company focused on mid-level technology applications, has made the following estimates: At $450 to $600 per affected computer program, it is estimated that a medium size company will spend from $3.6 to $4.2 million to make the software conversion. The cost per line of code is estimated to be $.80 to $1. Viasoft, which helps Fortune 1000 and similarly sized organizations worldwide understand, manage and develop the software applications that run their businesses, has seen program conversion cost rise to $572 to $1,204. Andersen Consulting, a global management and technology consulting organization, estimates that it will take them more than 12,000 working days to correct its existing applications. Estimates for the correction of this problem in the United States alone is around $50 to $75 billion (ITAA). Is it possible to eliminate the problem? Probably not, but the transition can be made much smoother with cooperation and the right approach. Companies and government agencies must understand the nature of the problem. Ignoring the obvious is not the way to approach this problem. To assume that the problem will be corrected when the system is replaced is a judgement that may cost companies a lot of money. Correcting the situation may not be so difficult as it will be time consuming. For instance, the Social Security Administration estimates that it will spend “300 man-years finding and correcting these date references in their information systems - systems representing a total of 30 million lines of code” (ITAA). One of the largest software manufacturing corpora...
