Another lesson, says LogLogic's Roth, was that systems last longer than we think and need to be ready for the future. "You always have to be future-proofing the software you write, the hardware you build," he says.
But IT organizations still have not learned as much from Y2K as they should have, says Gartner analyst Dale Vecchio, who covered Y2K at the time of the switch. "I'd like to tell you that there were a lot of lessons learned, but I'm not sure that I've seen a lot," he says.
For example, the Y2K experience might have caused organizations to keep current with knowledge of their IT portfolio, he says. Instead, "once they passed the risk of Y2K, they went back to the same lack of knowledge and now, when faced with an aging portfolio and aging workforce, they don't know any more now than they knew then," Vecchio says.
Many older applications are still running, but the people with the skills necessary to run them are inching toward retirement age, says Vecchio. "Baby Boomer retirements [are] bringing back a recognition that [IT shops] don't understand these application portfolios to move forward," he says. One reason that IT doesn't understand its application portfolio is due to one response to the Y2K issue: At the time, many businesses replaced homegrown software with vendors' Y2K-certified package software. "Y2K drove a lot of packaged software sales," Vecchio says. But much of that software is a black box for IT and is harder to maintain knowledge of.
This article, "Y2K: 10 years later," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.
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