Covington - Information Overload - Comparisons With Y2K

Information Overload - Comparisons With The Y2K Problem

Phillip A. Covington

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I chose the title for this section to illustrate how important it is for the design of any system to take into account the "big picture" over the potential life span of that system. The YK2, or Year 2000, problem came about not because the early computer technology out of which it arose wasn't sufficient to prevent the problem, but because the designers of the systems and software in use at that time didn't look far enough ahead. Of course, for a problem that took decades to really be noticed it's easy now in hindsight to talk about the "big mistakes" made years ago by others; that's not my intention here. But certainly we should learn from those earlier mistakes. The Year 2000 problem was not the first major oversight in computer technology for which there have been long-term consequences that affect us even today, and the appearance of newer problems tells us it won't be the last.

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This page last updated
29-Jan-1998

For those not familiar, the Year 2000 problem arose out of the very limited memory and storage capacities of earlier computers. While the Year 2000 "bug" was actually coded into various types of computers and computerized devices, even most of that was in the form of software; either internal software programs controlling the computer, or "external" software applications (such as accounting) being run by users. Because memory was such a precious (and VERY expensive) resource during the early years of computing computer programmers used every trick in the book to make the programs they wrote as small as possible so that they would take up less space. This included the amount of space taken up by the data users entered into the computers, such as dates.
As a way of saving space it universally became common for programmers to drop the first two "unneeded" digits of the year

so, for instance, 1985 became simply: "85." In time, not just programmers, but society in general became accustomed to abbreviating the date to just the last two digits, not because computers couldn't handle complete dates, but just to save space. All of the above would have been fine, except that virtually everyone overlooked the fact that a few short decades or years later when the date changed to the year 2000 there would be no way to compute the change in the thousands column with a 2-digit date!
At midnight on December 31, 1999 most systems that haven't been programmed to handle 4-digit dates (referred to as being "Year 200 compliant") will compute the new date ("00") as the year "1900" AD, 100 years in the past! I used the word "most" because some systems will behave in ways not all of which have been predicted. The Year 2000 problem is not a technology problem, just one of human oversight. To fix it in time won't so much require new technology as it will an incredible investment in human time and money.

Do It Right The First Time!

The moral to the above story is the same as one of my most basic pieces of advice when it comes to computers, document management, or things in general: Do it right the first time! Unfortunately, in today's fast-paced, drive-thru, have-it-now, "instant" society, and one where the "bottom-line" often takes precedence over the end results, the above motto itself seems frequently to still get overlooked!

Information Overload

Information Overload, like the phrase Year 2000, is a term coined fairly recently to describe the problem of what happens when an organization creates and stores more documents than it can effectively manage. After all, that's what the word "management" in "Information Management" and "Document Management" is for!
It is my personal opinion that while Information Overload is not as serious and immediate a problem as is Year 2000, that it also is largely being overlooked by huge numbers of organizations. There have already been numerous occurrences of important data being accidentally erased over or otherwise lost because it, and/or the media (disk drives, tapes, etc.) it was stored on, was not managed properly. Even if data isn't accidentally erased, and most isn't, it can still become next to useless if there is no reliable way to relate the data to the purpose for which it was intended. When this happens electronic data becomes no more useful than a paper document or file folder that has been misfiled. It might be found, or it may never be. Either way, it can be a big problem. This is compounded by the fact that computers store (and can lose) vastly greater amounts of information

sometimes spread across many locations via a company's network

than that found in even the most ambitious paper filing system.

Information Overload can only be avoided by proper planning, and by "doing it right the first time!" The sections on the Document Management page under Table of Contents talk more about "how."