After months of criticism of its own Year 2000 preparations, the UK government has decided it can give it out as well as take it, and has released surveys on the millennium compliance of more than 50 other nations. Posted on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) web site yesterday, it catalogs the readiness of countries’ telecommunications, power, water, health and transport.
So far only Ukraine has been singled out with the FCO recommending that Britons cancel trips. The Russian infrastructure, long the subject of US anxiety, provokes more concern. RAO UES, the electricity production and distribution monopoly, says that it may ration electricity in order to avoid missing out sectors of the population at the bottom of the priority list. All nuclear power plants will be switched to manual control near the end of the year. Russia expects to face gas distribution problems, which could affect countries dependent on its fuel, such as Italy.
Although the report says that countries like France and Italy have secured their utilities and mission critical systems as well as large businesses, smaller firms are not prepared. This was also the case in Japan, where financial institutions were compelled by legal threats to ban non-compliant firms. The Japan Travel Bureau (JTB) aims to stick well clear of the date change. It will not sell travel packages that include arrival or departure on December 31 or January 1.
David Marshall, vice president and managing director of UK software developer Greenwich Mean Time Ltd (GMT) says that this SME analysis is reflected in the market. In Japan however, he says that there is a lot of work to do because the country started its compliance plans so late. Marshall sounded a cautionary note about large firms and the manner in which millennium readiness is measured. Most of the time, he says, being compliant means that a company has a Y2K project director.
