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| In My Opinion.......
Where Angels Fear To Tread So, here we are in January 2000 and the world is still here. Much more importantly for some, our computer systems are still working. There was no mass failure of public services or communications, no food shortages, no rioting or civil unrest, and no planes fell out of the sky. Was the industry right to make such a big deal about the problem? Clearly the doomsayers got it completely wrong, so was the whole thing just a scam to sell expensive software upgrades, consultancy and books about the Y2K apocalypse? Of course not. Common sense tells us that there was a problem and it needed addressing – Y2K audits proved that in most cases. For those who spent a fortune with no discernible result, I suggest they consider it simply as a form of “insurance premium” – how would it have looked if they had done nothing and everything had fallen apart on New Year’s Eve? The fact that there were so few Y2K-related incidents on January 1st is testimony to the fact that the IT industry as a whole recognised the problem in time and worked hard to solve it as best it could. The ones that do stand out as the bad boys in all this are those Y2K scaremongers who advised us that we were facing a return to the dark ages. The ones who told us to alter our way of living, to withdraw our money from the banks and use it to stockpile food and fuel in the event of the inevitable breakdown in world order. If you want to see an impressive display of back peddling from just such a doom merchant, take a quick look at www.yourdon.com.� By the way, the astute ones amongst you will recognise that just because New Year’s Eve passed without major incident (apart from uncle Frank drinking 14 pints of champagne and throwing up in the fish tank) the problem is not necessarily over. There will be a period of “bedding in” for all the newly updated computer systems, with key events such as month-end, quarter-end and year-end – not to mention the leap year factor - still causing concern for the IT boys until 2001. It is still not necessary to fill a concrete bunker full of baked beans and petrol, however. As we move forward into the new millennium, what does the IT world have in store for us in 2000? Looking back, you might be forgiven for describing 1999 as the year of e-commerce. If that is the case, then 2000 should be the year of putting it right! The title of this piece is a little jab at all those organisations who rushed headlong – and somewhat foolishly – into implementing some half-baked e-commerce strategy without really stopping to think about the implications should anything go wrong. The numerous cock-ups that have occurred already throughout the e-commerce world are enough to make Y2K look like small potatoes – and things are likely to get much worse before they get better. In the past, companies have been free to rush headlong into the latest and greatest “must have” strategy safe in the knowledge that it could all be swept carefully under the carpet if everything went pear shaped. When the new IT system is actually an electronic shop front for your company, however, you had better make sure you get it right first time. No retail organisation would dream of opening a store with wrongly-labelled stock, doors that randomly deny access to potential customers, a stores manager that repeatedly prevents you from purchasing items that are clearly in stock, and a checkout girl who empties your trolley all over the shop floor and then gives your credit card to the customer in the queue behind you. Yet this is the sort of electronic shopping equivalent we are expected to put up with on many of today’s e-commerce sites. Further problems are caused when the shiny new Web-based system tries to integrate with the clunky old back-office systems behind it. Has anyone actually tried to shop on-line at Tesco? It is quicker to go and do your shopping at the local store than it is to wade through the tortuously slow Web front end to Tesco Direct. Elsewhere on the Internet, Egg’s customers have had their credit card details broadcast in plain text in the subject line of an e-mail, and Argos mistakenly advertised a �299 TV for �2.99. These are just a few examples of many similar bad experiences from 1999.� As Web access becomes a reality from all sorts of everyday devices such as TV’s and mobile phones, the idea that we can go shopping 24 hours a day from our armchairs will become increasingly attractive. In order to cope with this the software industry needs to be capable of implementing virtually bug-free systems at the first attempt. But is that an achievable expectation? Probably not – in which case on-line retailers need to gear up their technical support operation to cope with the inevitable deluge of queries. Never before have we had the potential to extend the user interface for our corporate systems right into the home of the customer (who may be completely computer illiterate). However, a poorly implemented electronic store front can quite easily lose a customer forever with one wrong mouse click, whilst a dodgy piece of SQL buried code somewhere in the system could quickly send your company into receivership. Even if neither of these things manage to finish you off, the fact that your investors and shareholders – as well as fund managers and analysts - can see all your mistakes in glorious technicolour HTML means that your company could have its share value decimated overnight. Perhaps the next stock market crash could be triggered by a couple of dodgy e-commerce systems? Now there is another bandwagon that those Y2K doomsayers can jump on.�
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