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If firm productivity did improve with investment in Information technology (IT) the shareholder value of publicly traded companies would increase with IT spending. When we studied the relation between shareholder value and IT spending by Fortune 1000 companies as they prepared for the Y2K date change we found that shareholder value associated with Y2K spending was in fact many times greater than the spending itself. We also found this strong positive relation between shareholder value and Y2K spending persisted through the market downturn of 2000-2002.

Preparing information systems for the 2000 date roll over was generally regarded solely as a necessary and costly endeavor. In the popular media and industry press, the focus was almost exclusively negative and reports generally addressed the Y2K issue as an operation cost organisations had to bear. Few discussions addressed the long-term organizational advantages to be gained from this experience, or the opportunity Y2K preparation presented for organizations. These shortcomings are addressed and the details of the gains achieved in the U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC) are given in this article. Their experience is applicable outside of a military setting. CFC'S need for continual operation is also shared by commercial corporations in the financial and public utility sectors, as well as mass transportation hubs, such as international airports and shipping centers. CFC resembles a large, multinational corporation and has several information management systems and it operates in an environment that relies on support systems from multiple countries for infrastructure and basic processes.

Presents several letter to the editor related to the computer industry, published in the June 2000 issue of the journal "Communications of the ACM." Needs for improving human computer interface; Efforts for solving problems related to Y2K data conversion problem; Debate on the goal of a computer software engineer.

Focuses on officers of both United States' and Russia's space commands, who joined forces on New Year's Eve 1999 to make sure that no Y2K computer glitch caused misfired missiles or weapons. Their reaction to the lack of incident; Preparation around the world for disaster; The lack of any major incident. INSETS: The Birthday Girl Turns 100;A Party for Midnight's Babies;The Price of Vigilance;World Without End

Offers advice on computer maintenance with regard to year 2000 (Y2K) computer compliance. Risk with some hardware, Windows operating systems, and applications; Web sites and software utilities to test for and fix problems; Four-part approach to analyzing the Y2K problem; Data debugging; Routine maintenance with defragmenting.

Focuses on the celebrations for the new year and concerns that there would be a crisis due to the year 2000 (Y2K) computer date conversion. Example of the Eckhart family in Lisbon, Ohio, who stockpiled food in preparation for a disaster; Amount spent on Y2K military preparations; How the Republic of Kiribati won the media's designation as the birthplace of the third millennium; The author's suggestion for people, who stayed in bunkers, should come out and celebrate.

The article presents information on Y2K computer problems. Despite desperate efforts to correct the monumentally short-sighted failure to program the world's computers and computer chips with complete data codes, some disruption is now inevitable when the clocks ticks over at midnight at the end of the year. Most worrisome, because of their vast potential for destruction, are the world's nuclear weapons arsenals and nuclear power plants. For if the network of interconnected systems collapses and cascades into systemic infrastructure failures, power and communications could be lost worldwide.

The article focuses on likely problems companies might face in case of unpreparednes for the Y2K. An occasional blackout could result if a noncompliant computer in the grid gets confused about the date. Valid credit cards may be rejected as out of date. Small bank ATMs may only work with a fraction of the supported debit and credit cards. Air Traffic Control problems may arise in the smaller, local airports spawning missed connections for the passengers and load-scheduling problems for air- port hubs. In Sweden, airport police were unable to issue one-year temporary passports after midnight, December 31, 1998. Computers refused to accept a termination date beyond December 31, 1999. Palace Produce sued Tec America Inc. because their system was incapable of handling credit cards with a certain expiration date. They won their case and were awarded $250,000 in damages. Newspapers, magazines and the World Wide Web are replete with similar stories. And there is every expectation these sorts of incidents will continue for the immediate future. Also, consider accounting and spreadsheet software that seem to take on a mind of their own when it comes to manual and automated attempts to reset to correct dates.

Resolving the problem of Y2K compliance is a serious issue for the distributed enterprises. As organizations rely on distributed desktops for decision-making and productivity, risks associated with noncompliant desktops are receiving increased attention from the media, industry analysts, government officials and corporate leaders. Although most organizations have been aggressively correcting the Y2K problem on their central mainframe applications, many are only beginning to address the significant risks posed by errant desktop software, hardware and firmware. Since these distributed assets are critical to corporate productivity, organizations are vulnerable to significant risks if any of the distributed information technology assets cannot properly process four-digit dates. The majority of organizations do not have accurate asset information to identify noncompliant desktops, they have not determined which desktops to fix and in what order, and they have not developed a methodology to ensure that problems are corrected and not reintroduced into the enterprise. INSETS: Research Methodology and Demographics.;The Status of Each Y2K Compliance Step..

Focuses on arguments of several members of the United States Senate who support the Y2K Act. Includes Oregon Senator Ron Wyden; Arizona Senator John McCain; Connecticut Senator Joseph I. Lieberman; Mississippi Senator Trent Lott.

Focuses on arguments of several members of the United States Senate who opposed the Y2K Act. Includes Vermont Senator Patrick J. Leahy; Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry; South Carolina Senator Ernest F. Hollings.

Looks at the United States' President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion program. Industries that have encountered the Y2k problem before January 1, 2000; Goals of the program; Creation of working groups to focus on the Y2K challenges; Readiness of the US federal government and several industries. INSET: The President's Council..

Evaluates the Year 2000 (Y2K) computer problem and the amount of time left to fix it. The cause of the problem; Strategies to solve the problem and their drawbacks; Windowing, date expansion, and encapsulation; Author's prediction of the severity of the disruption. INSET: Problems Embedded Everywhere.

Reports the efforts of the United States government to prevent terrorism with the arrival of the year 2000 and the possible computer difficulties with the year 2000 date conversion (Y2K). Terrorism threats and governmental warnings; Arrests made; History of terrorism and its changes as of 1999 to `asymmetric warfare'; Possible attacks from Osama bin Laden or cells related to his protectors, the Taliban government in Afghanistan; Outlook.

Focuses on concern over the Year 2000 computer bug, or Y2K and its religious and social implications. How people are preparing for the potential collapse of public utilities and food shortages; Example of Bruce Eckhart and his family; Lack of clear agreement over how bad the problem will be; Danger of religious cults, or millenialists; Books which have been written on the topic from a religious perspective; Worry of churches that false predictions could undermine the authority of biblical teachings generally. INSETS: Getting Ready for the Millennium;Target: Jerusalem;Guides for the Perplexed And the Paranoid.

Presents letters to the editor related to the computer industry, published in the June 1998 issue of the periodical "Communications of the ACM." Significance of educational software; Methods suggested to deal with the year 2000 date conversion; Factors which can promote restructuring of the Internet address systems.

The article focuses on the millennium bug problem in interactive services which is due to occur at the year-end of 2000. The article illustrates that there are several practical examples showing that interactive services like banking or airline reservations cannot inherently be realized by non-interactive or Turing machine systems. In dealing with the Y2K problem computer users take each system report of a correct date as a confirming instance of the hypothesis that the system's reported date is always correct. What the Y2K problem shows is that correct time observations were not confirming instances of this hypothesis at all, but rather one where "date" terms were unknowingly temporally qualified. The result of the computing community's byte parsimony is a multitude of computing systems that will not, in the normal course of things, roll over to 2000 at the end of this century. The genesis of the Y2K problem is seen to be an instance of the "new riddle of induction." It results from the mistaken belief that a computer date stamp is projectable, that is the confirmation of a hypothesis. The root cause of the present malady is byte conservation. In retrospect, a viable solution to the Y2K problems was to have been found in geochronology all along, which has been presented in the article.

One certain way to improve the quality of data is to improve its use. The principal role of an information system is to present views of the real world so that the people in an organization can create products or make decisions. If those views do not substantially agree with the real world for any extended period of time, then the system is a poor one, and, ultimately, like a delusional psychotic, the organization will begin to act irrationally. The only way to truly improve data quality is to increase the use of that data. If an organization wants to improve data quality, it needs to ensure that there is stringent use of each data element. Because of the potential for year 2000 problems, every organization in the world that uses computers will have to confront the problems of data. This, coupled with the increased need for quality data for decision making, will make data quality a high priority item in every enterprise. Use-based data quality provides a theoretically sound and practically achievable means to improve data quality.

Presents the solution to bewildering Y2K problem called "windowing." Advantages of windowing; derivation of century information from 2-digit years; limitations of windowing; need to modify program statements; adaptation of sorting and indexing routines; accurate representation of dates and times; representation of dates by integer days.

Ponders the effect that the Year 2000 computer problem will have on anything that is controlled by computers. Communications; Medicine; Weapons; Money; Food; Air-traffic control; Factories; Worst scenario; What is likely to happen. INSET: The sky is falling, the sky is falling!.

Describes the year 2000 computer problem and myths associated with it. Nature of the problem; Forecasted complications and effects already felt; Difficulty fixing the problem; Myth that there is plenty of time to fix the problem; Myth that someone will soon fix the problem; Myth that enough money is being spent to fix the problem; Myth of computer invulnerability; Myth that individuals will not be affected.

Explains why the manufacturing sector has the most at stake in relation to the year 2000 computer problem. The more complex and widespread problems than those in straightforward computer applications such as accounting and finance; The slowness of manufacturing corporations to respond to the problems as worsening the situation. INSET: Spending Plans Hold Steady.

Reports on the overall lack of preparedness for the year 2000 (Y2K) computer problem and growing alarm in Washington and elsewhere of its possible negative impact on the economy. Securities & Exchange Commission urging companies to start reporting the effect of Year 2000 on their earnings; Y2K's negative impact on productivity and growth; Higher interest rates; Amount of skilled labor needed to fix Y2K; Computers impacted. INSET: How did we get into this mess anyway?.

By now, most executives are familiar with the famous Year 2000 problem--and many believe that their companies have the situation well in hand. After all, it seems to be such a trivial problem--computer software that interprets "00" to be the year 1900 instead of the year 2000. And yet armies of computer professionals have been working on it--updating code in payroll systems, distribution systems, actuarial systems, sales-tracking systems, and the like. The problem is pervasive. Not only is it in your systems, it's in your suppliers' systems, your bankers' systems, and your customers' systems. It's embedded in chips that control elevators, automated teller machines, process--control equipment, and power grids. Already, a dried-food manufacturer destroyed millions of dollars of perfectly good product when a computer counted inventory marked with an expiration date of "00" as nearly a hundred years old. And when managers of a sewage-control plant turned the clock to January 1, 2000 on a computer system they thought had been fixed, raw sewage pumped directly into the harbor. It has become apparent that there will not be enough time to find and fix all of the problems by January 1, 2000. And what good will it do if your computers work but they're connected with systems that don't? That is one of the questions Harvard Business School professor Richard Nolan asks in his introduction to HBR's Perspectives on the Year 2000 issue. How will you prepare your organization to respond when things start to go wrong? Fourteen commentators offer their ideas on how senior managers should think about connectivity and control in the year 2000 and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the implications of the Year 2000 computer bug. The reports that corporations are not taking the task of working out glitches seriously enough; The results of a Securities and Exchange Commission filings that indicated that a majority of the United States companies had not completed the first step of assessing whether their systems are ready for the next century; The genesis of the bug; The scenarios that are being predicted. INSET: Why the government's machines won't make it.

The article deals with the Y2K bug which reemerged in 2020 and will again appear in 2038 and 2486.

This article focuses on the Y2K e-commerce problem. Y2K will prove to be one of the most interesting years in history as it is known as the landmark year in capitalism. Y2K saw the foundation of the IT economy crumble at the same time it helped produce the largest budget surplus in history of the U.S. There are five key ingredients to e-commerce: A diffuse, digital networking infrastructure; A means for delivering and rendering acceptable cybermedia content; A mechanism for handling transactions in a secure environment. A financial infrastructure to handle the accounting and invoicing for transactions; A viable business plan. In real sense, e-commerce has its origins in the bulletin boards of the 1970s. The two most popular, early forms of communication in this period were email and bulletin boards. The one dark spot on the horizon is that the problem that caused the Y2K e-commerce meltdown is still with an over reliance on technology to overcome weaknesses of a bad business model.

The article discusses the author's views on queries related to Y2K related problems, mainly from people with a nontechnical background. According to a study, the U.S. public rates its overall confidence in high tech companies more than seven times greater than its confidence in banks and churches. Many of the industry's dirty little secrets may be revealed. Especially those ones about high rates of cancelled and late IT projects, the abysmal level of software quality practices, the persistence of Y2K problems in many of the newest software and hardware offerings from supposedly the best and brightest companies and the bewildering ambiguity that clouds nearly every so called "year 2000 compliance and/or disclosure" statement. Notwithstanding the varying degrees of complicity by engineers, auditors, accountants, users, management and others, the simple fact remains that the code is broken and the code is the responsibility of the computing profession. The extent to which this broken code causes inconvenience and disruption will largely determine the degree to which the public's high opinion of the high tech industry will falter.

The article presents response of readers of the magazine "Communications of the ACM," on articles published in the previous issues of the magazine. In Richard Hsu's article regarding correlation of patents and living standards, Hsu fails to mention what he believes are the strengths and weaknesses of patent systems, implying that strong patent systems are flawless. In the "Forum" letter by Eric Weiss, he says that the foreseeable end of new Social Security numbers is a threat to the world. Since this problem affects only the U.S., which contains only a few percent of the world's population, this is a strong overstatement. Weiss claims the SSN problem dwarfs the Y2K computer problem.

Profiles Roger Ferguson, vice chairman of the United States Federal Reserve System's Board of Governors. Discussion of the possibility that Ferguson could replace Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve chairman; Preparations for the year 2000 date conversion; How Ferguson's relationship with his dad helped develop his interest in interest rates.

Examines the possible impact of the year 2000 computer dating problem on global financial markets. Fears about the problem being manifest before January 1, 2000; Views of Edward Yardeni of Deutsche Bank Securities, New York City; Anticipation of a stock market drop; Recent success of the Dow Jones industrials; Problems the computer crashes could cause; Vulnerability of the current bull market; Profit-making opportunities due to the problem.

Focuses on Boulder, Colorado-based mail-order company Jade Mountain and owner Steve Troy. Business windfall from people expecting chaos as a result of the year 2000 computer crisis; Products for independence from established power grids; Troy's attitude about the pre-millennial panic; Company revenues.

The article analyzes the problems facing businesses in the U.S. from disruptions caused by the Year 2000 computer crisis. The efforts of companies in the country to avoid disruptions are already distorting the economy. Surveys show that more than a third of manufacturers plan to hire inventories of raw materials, by 23% in the fourth quarter of 1999. Some major advertising agencies report that major clients are cutting back on lose business rather than create demand that they might not be able to fill. Financial markets will be affected too. In the bond markets, the Y2K effect can be seen in growing interest-rate spreads.

Presents the fiscal policy choices facing the U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan on the issue of raising interest rates. Continuing economic expansion; Reigniting of inflation; Pricey stocks; Global outlook; Year 2000 bug. INSETS: THE CASE FOR RAISING RATES;THE CASE AGAINST.

Discusses the costs associated with the millennium software glitch that could paralyze computers in the year 2000. Estimated amount that companies in the United States plan to spend on the problem; Amount of money AT&T and Chase Manhattan Corp. say they will spend; Comment from Y2K-watcher Edward E. Yardeni on the cost; Findings by companies that tests of some repair software are not working properly; How the problem could boost the gross domestic product in 1999. INSET: Attention, Shoppers: The World Is About to..., by Hilary Hylton.