Discussion on:

Y2K consultants: Where are they now?

The statements:

"...once companies realized that all that was required to fix the "bug" was a repetitive process of checking data,..."

and

"The Y2K skill mostly involved training someone to look for all the dates and make the appropriate changes. An administrative individual could do this, or very entry-level techies."

are UTTER BALDERDASH!!!!!!!!!!

Assuming the media hype surrounding Y2K was based on such "expert" analysis as this, the overreaction to the issue on the part of the public is understandable.

I don't know which planet's Y2K problem the article referred to, but here on earth the problems were software, not data, related. For example (since the author clearly didn't understand): Many older programs allowed only 2 digits for years - sorts fine as long as you are tracking dates in one century. Cross a century border and this year appears earlier than last year. More esoteric - many old programs used "dummy" dates like 9/9/99 to indicate the date was unknown.
You needed to be able to analyze and fix the old code to solve these problems - not reenter data!

When Y2K passed successfully, many of us (project managers for the Y2K remediation efforts) took a look at what was gained over the 4-5 years of working this problem (opportunity). I can say I am still employed at the same location and actually working towards making more contribution to the organization than I did when monitoring the progress towards full Y2K compliance. This sucess was accomplished by determining not what was wrong and where the holes in the organization's IT policies and implementation strategies were, but with a deeper understanding of the organization than before. This new understanding was leveraged into a plan to advance both the advent of an Enterprise Architecture and the practice of the discipline Knowledge Management.