British firms are insufficiently prepared for the Year 2000 date change, according to a new survey by Business Strategies, a economic forecasting consultancy. Robin Guenier, head of Taskforce 2000, says that Britain is significantly lagging behind and part of the problem seems to be ignorance of the risks. The survey, commissioned by law firm Dibb Lupton Alsop, which has 40 lawyers working on this issue finds that at the end of 1998, only 44% of companies had spent 60% or more of their budgets, and 10% only began working on the problem in 1998. Substantial numbers of respondents to the survey said that they had not completed inventories; 16% for central IT, 23% for distributed servers/PCs, 31% for telecoms, 45% for embedded chips.
