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It's not enough to get your own systems compoliant. You have to get every system compliant that interfaces with yours. This is VISA's problem.
This appeared in TECHWIRE (Sept. 19): "Visa Debits The Vendors."
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Fixing the year 2000 problem involves partners. Just ask Visa International. It spent more than five years helping to prepare the credit card industry for the year 2000, and it recently declared the world would be ready by this October for cards with expiration dates in 2000 and beyond. But despite Visa's massive efforts, some software and systems vendors are moving too slowly for both Visa's external and internal compliance efforts. . . .
Vendor shortcomings are also plaguing Visa's effort to make its internal systems year 2000-compliant. Visa has 15 percent of its applications entering the testing phase. "Ease of use isn't there with the automated tools on the market," complains John McCarthy, vice president for the year 2000 project at Visa, in Foster City, Calif. "We're reviewing tools, but haven't seen anything we like."
Similarly, Visa acquired an IBM mainframe and dedicated it to the 2000 project, "but until the year 2000-compliant version of OS/390 software was loaded, we couldn't test," McCarthy says. Some tools and utilities for the operating system are still not compliant, he adds, "so we have to wait for vendors to provide us with them."
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