M&G reporter
Telecommunications Minister Jay Naidoo’s bold plan to counter the year 2000 computer crisis may be too late, computer industry sources warn.
While the United States is expected to achieve compliance by July 1999, South Africa is thought to be at least a year behind in preparations for the year 2000 problem.
Although Naidoo’s plan is broad and far- reaching, the time frames could be too tight for ensuring compliance by various sectors of the economy and government to avert chaos at midnight on December 31 1999, when computers’ internal clocks, changing over, mistake the year 2000 for 1900.
The “millennium bug” is caused by year dates in computers being entered by early programmers as two digits, instead of four. “1997” therefore appears in a computer’s internal clock as “97”.
Naidoo’s plan, unveiled this week, will see a national co-ordinating committee in place by the end of January. The committee will have seven sub-committees to ensure compliance in the government, the financial sector, parastatals, the information technology sector, industrial and other computer users.
The committee will be made up of 10 private- and public-sector professionals, and will report monthly to a Cabinet ministers’ committee, chaired by Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and convened by Naidoo.
“It would have been a good start two years ago,” says Professor Ken MacGregor, of the University of Cape Town’s computer science department. He says if a census of what compliance conversion needs to be done will only be completed by April, according to Naidoo’s plan, then a strategy to deal with the problem could only be formulated and realistically put into practice in the third quarter of next year.
“You suddenly have 15 months to convert all the programmes, when it really should have started a year ago. It’s going to need a very aggressive conversion strategy,” he says.
The assessment – by means of a questionnaire – would analyse all levels in the various sectors of the economy and government. It would also estimate the financial, economic and technical implications for the country.
Naidoo says the financial sector is the most advanced in coping with the millennium bug, with the Reserve Bank co-ordinating projects. “But,” says the source, “the lack of concern in South Africa is very worrying.”
MacGregor says one advantage of beginning so late is that automation processes have been developed to remedy the year 2000 problem in large mainframes, the predominant source of the coding problem because most institutions rely on them. Even then, booking time through the centres which perform the conversion may be very difficult, he says.