Contingency Planning - returning to pencil and paper?

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

I read about people saying, "We can always go back to manual systems if the computer systems fail."

This so called possibility seems pretty farfetched. I remember some of the early computer systems I helped build, the result of which was that up to several hundred paper-and-pencil clerical workers were "released to more productive work". But each of those workers had a substantial body of knowledge about how their particular process worked - accounts payable, accounts receivable, catalog order transaction processing, etc which had been captured and coded into the computer programs. It would take months or years in any large organization to recruit, train and equip a group of employees.

Pencils require pencil sharpeners, erasers, carbon paper, special forms, special ledger books. They require file cabinets by the thousands. They used desks with different shapes and sizes than used by PC jockeys.

I suppose that eventually, an organization could go back to manual systems, but it won't work on January 3, 2000. <<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>

-- Dan Hunt (dhunt@hostscorp.com), September 04, 1998

Answers

Indeed, like "fix-on-failure", this seems to me to be Y2K Denial in its more advanced phase. We are completely dependent on our computer based technology, it provides electricity, clean water, food supply, communications, etc. Yet now it turns out that well, we don't really need the technology anyway. We can write 1,000,000 checks by hand every week. We can use non-existent manual switches and overrides to keep our electricity, communications and transportation flowing. I miss the primitive Y2K denial approach, There Is No Problem, at least it was not so downright silly.

-- Joe (shar@pei.com), September 10, 1998.

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