The year 2000 date crisis.

• Author: Schick, Kevin

The year 2000 date change poses one of the most significant challenges ever faced by the information technology (IT) industry and will have enormous impact on business applications, packaged applications, and systems software. It creates a major problem that must be addressed by virtually all organizations that have computerized information systems. Without practical solutions, organizations' information systems could collapse, and the cost of the solution could drive some companies out of business. Of particular risk are systems that are heavily dependent upon dates (i.e., personnel systems, pension systems, budget applications).

Put simply, the problem is the absence from almost all software of the two-digit century value within the date that distinguishes dates as either 19xx or 20xx. Information systems (IS) organizations have three choices. They could make the mistake of ignoring the year 2000, or they could try to rewrite all their applications and change all their affected data, which is both risky and expensive. Alternatively, information systems managers can evaluate the problem's scope at their organization and apply solutions based on business/operations drivers and opportunities. Strategies integrated with development initiatives and supportive of the organization's requirements will yield applications that evolve with the needs of the organization.

Applications Development Odyssey

The year 2000 problem stems from the limits of technology in past decades and the related previous high costs of storing information. In the 1960s, the dominant method of entering data into a computer-based system was the 80-column, key-punched card, a 72-character card with eight characters reserved for control information. The card format forced a data-entry strategy that minimized character usage. In addition, early databases were designed based on hierarchical structures and optimized to transaction-based processing; the result was that the relevant dates of a transaction were stored in the same database record as the other transaction data. By not storing the century value when a date was stored, a savings of two bytes per date was achieved. At the time, the approach was a tremendous cost saver.

The problem then spread into application code because applications are designed based on data, and the data were stored without the two-digit century value. Even when organizations migrated to a relational database management systems, the date data were...