News
CCD Puts Companies to the Test
In an effort to demonstrate that even the world's largest U.S. organizations are not yet ready for Year 2000, CCD Online Systems Inc. (CCD) announced that it is challenging several organizations who are industry leaders to verify their program code for Y2K statement errors free of charge. As part of the unique program, CCD - a worldwide provider of de facto industry standard Y2K-compliant software solutions - will offer a donation of $50,000 for computer education to the local school or school district of each organization challenged if CCD fails to find at least 50 significant non-Y2K-compliant date statements per each one million lines of code inspected. The organizations are: Internal Revenue Service; United Way of America; Merck & Company; State Farm Insurance Company; Chase Manhattan Bank; United Parcel Service; Humana Inc.; Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Bell South Corporation; Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation; Salomon Smith Barney; International Business Machines Corporation; Ford Motor Company; Time-Warner Inc.
CCD selected these organizations for the Challenge because CCD believes they are among the best-prepared organizations in the world for Y2K problems. The Challenge aims to demonstrate that even organizations of this caliber are still at risk.
"Our goal in the final months before the new century date change is to help organizations identify and correct potentially fatal Y2K errors," says Jim McGovern, President and COO of CCD. "Recent analyst findings and our own in-house reports show that most organizations have a false sense of security about the possibility of business interruptions due to Y2K related outages. People have taken too much comfort in the fact that the '9/9/99 bug' proved relatively uneventful. Nonetheless, it is very clear to us that there will be significant problems on and after January 1, 2000. It is critical that this message be heeded. If Y2K errors are known to exist, the operational disruption can be managed. Our software solution should be used as an essential part of an organization's contingency planning activities, it should also be used so that senior management receives a truly independent assessment of their Y2K status while there is still time to modify, if necessary, the existing contingency plan. We want to ensure that organizations are ready."
The Year 2000 Experts Poll1, a recent study of chief information officers at approximately 1,000 global firms, reports that 81 percent of companies have not completed the remediation of their Y2K problem. The study also notes 40 percent of the executives and managers involved in Y2K projects believe that between one and ten percent of their mission-critical systems could fail.
"Despite diligent efforts on the part of Y2K project teams, and the staggering expenditure of time and money, an unacceptable number of errors still remain hidden in purportedly Y2K-compliant source code. To make matters worse, most Y2K teams are unaware of the presence of significant undetected errors," says McGovern. "Our company has yet to conduct a sample verification with our software product, Beyond 1999/Validate, for a Fortune 1000 company whose code is 100 percent Y2K-compliant."
In addition to the Year 2000 Experts Poll, GartnerGroup indicates in its recent Year 2000 World Status report2 that failures in 2000 will be due to businesses running defective and inadequately tested code, among other problems. The report further estimates that five to nine percent of defective lines of code will remain after remediation and testing have been completed.
The CCD Challenge will remain in effect through December 30, 1999. For more information about the CCD Challenge, or to arrange an assessment, call (800) 328-6755.