By Tim Giles
As published in Marketing Magazine October 2006

Chicken Little was in the woods one day when an acorn fell on her head. It scared her so much she trembled all over. She shook so hard, half her feathers fell out. “Help! Help! The sky is falling! I have to go tell the king!”

With hindsight it is tempting to view the Y2K issue in similar farcical terms to the classic kids story. The doomsday predictions and mad rush on tinned produce certainly helped add an extra spice to a New Years Eve spent in the hastily dug bunker in the back yard. When the promised apocalypse failed to materialise the sighs of relief were countered with accusingly pointed fingers. Was it just an engineered hyperbole driven panic to drum up business for programmers? A first knife thrust to business confidence in over-hyped IT that would finally be delivered a merciful Coup de Gras a few months later with the crash of the Nasdaq.

Programmers counter that the reason nothing happened was the preparedness of the systems frantically overhauled and tweaked in the months leading up to the millennium. Imagine the carnage if global business had done nothing? A world of chaos narrowly averted by the timely intervention of a committed army of coders whose new Audi’s and Beemers are just reward for averting Armageddon.

The truth is somewhere in between these extremes. Programmers did exploit the panic and pour petrol on the flames to drive up their hourly charge out rates and build nest eggs from which the next generation of Chicken Little’s could hatch in the future. However, New Years Day 2000 was not entirely incident free. According to John Koskinen, who oversaw the Y2K program for Bill Clinton, there were a number of concerning incidents regarding low level airport monitoring, satellite communications and credit card processing systems that didn’t get much publicity in face of the tsunami of relief when the world did not end at midnight. Of course these could have just been coincidental, like the many common system gremlins that spring up daily.

The problem with Y2K is that it is extremely difficult to prove definitively one way or the other. Was the frenzy of Y2K preventative measures the magic cure or a placebo? Is the absence of any serious consequence proof of the campaigns success or exposure of it as a crock? As Koskinen said the only way to prove conclusively would be “for half the world to stop and then somehow get it started again.” This didn’t happen and so now the big question now is do Turkey Lurkey and Henny Penny still trust Chicken Little with the big decisions regarding IT infrastructure.