Year 2000 - when the clock strikes one

Is the UK doing all it can to be ready for the year 2000, or is the country set for one hell of a headache on 1 January?

It's the $64,000 question: what will happen on that night?

According to Don Cruickshank, chairman of the government's Action 2000 taskforce, this is the wrong question to ask. 'The truth is, no one really knows. I don't. You don't. It depends.'

If government, companies and organisations do all that they can, then things should be OK on the night, believes Cruickshank. It's a view shared by year 2000 expert Peter de Jager, although he is less optimistic than Cruickshank about just how much progress has been made.

'We are addressing this problem too late,' says de Jager. 'We will not fix every system in time, we will not even fix all the mission-critical systems in time.'

De Jager is also convinced that businesses will fail directly because of the year 2000 problem. 'If business doesn't depend upon computers, why are companies using computers?' he says.

Canada-based De Jager argues his views from a world perspective. Cruickshank's focus is closer to home. His responsibility has been to spread awareness about year 2000 among UK business, and to offer help for businesses of all sizes in dealing with the problem.

Cruickshank believes that the UK is on course to beat the bug, and he says he has evidence to prove it. Action 2000 conducted a review of 236 of the FTSE 500 companies and found that eight in 10 of them were on course to complete their year 2000 work in time.

Good news? Certainly, but it's not the spin that Robin Guenier, boss of rival millennium campaign Taskforce 2000, chose to put on a similar set of figures produced last month.

A survey undertaken by Business Strategies for law company Dibb Lupton Alsop asked 1,000 top UK industrial and commercial companies to detail their year 2000 work. The survey found that 16% had not completed an inventory of their central IT - the essential first step in year 2000 work - and 23% had not completed their inventories of distributed systems and PCs.

Over 60% of companies had not completed remediation work and 80% of them had not completed implementation and testing.

Guenier believes he has found a damning comparison between these figures and those of Action 2000.

'I feared the results might be worse than those in a recent government survey, which indicated that the majority of big companies were on course. In fact, it is much worse,' he says.

This only shows, of course, that statistics - and especially statistics resulting from surveys - can usually say more or less what anyone wants them to say.

The figures from the Business Strategies survey cannot be 'much worse' than Action 2000's because they are incomparable. The former survey asked major companies what they had done, the latter asked them what they expected to get done.

There is no contradiction between 80% of companies admitting they have not completed remediation, testing and implementation work and 80% of companies expecting to have completed the work by the deadline. It may be implausible, but it is not a contradiction.

Cruickshank's findings are based on the work of the National Infrastructure Forum (NIF) - a loose grouping of regulatory bodies and interested parties that gathers information about how well those organisations that make up the essential infrastructure of the UK are dealing with the bug.

The NIF covers water, oil, gas, electricity and telecoms sectors, along with some oversight of the financial sector. The forum made its first statement to the public last month, and the word was that in general, things were going pretty well for UK plc.

Cruickshank, who chaired the meeting, had this to say on infrastructure: 'There is a significant number of key services that constitute the building blocks of the national infrastructure.

'The goal is business as usual during the critical period. There is still a lot of work to be done before we can say this with full confidence, but I am clear that the NIF process is underway as an effective route to delivering the information that businesses and the public require.'

As far as the core infrastructure is concerned, 90% of the sector will be year 2000-compliant by mid-1999, with the remaining 10% achieving compliance by September 1999. As for telephone lines, 95% of fixed lines will be millennium-ready by the middle of this year, with the remainder following by the end of September 1999.

Telecoms regulator Oftel has been busy encouraging telcos to exchange information and help each other. Not that it needed much help. BT made it clear last year that it was willing to pool information and to share year 2000 tools developed in-house with telcos at home and abroad. After all, even if BT fixes its own network, it stands to lose millions if subscribers cannot call numbers run by other telcos.

As for the electricity supply, regulator Offer reports that the '20 or so major players' in the sector 'have largely completed work to rectify critical systems', but added that 'some tests to demonstrate full compliance remain outstanding'.

Its a similar story with Ofgas, and the oil and financial sectors mark similar progress.

But the surprising thing in all these announcements is that no one seems willing to talk about the problems they are having with year 2000 work.

De Jager holds firm to the conviction that it is impossible to push through these major software remediation projects without encountering failures.

What's worrying him is that many companies and organisations around the world are now claiming to have done the remedial work, tested the systems and then implemented them - and very few of them seem to be failing.

De Jager puts it simply: 'Failure is evidence of effort'. No failures? Maybe the job has not been done.