SESSION 1- WELCOME

Keynote Address: Ron Balls, BT and ITU Year 2000 Task Force Chairman

Ron Balls commenced his presentation by saying how delighted he was to be at the conference and talk about a subject that he had been deeply involved with for the last two years - the century date change into the next millennium.

He said that the world was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first computer and, at the same time, facing a bill of some £1500 billion to fix the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem. He continued by running over a variety of systems that would be at risk - fuel supply and power, hospitals and sanitation, air traffic control, trucking, lighthouses, cash registers, PCs and domestic television sets.

Turning to telecommunications and its application in banking and finance, he referred to dependent systems such as VISA with 300,000 interlinked automatic teller machines and the SWIFT system with a throughput of 4 million financial transactions per day.

Cap Gemini, Europe's largest computer services company, had recently undertaken a survey of companies in Europe which indicated that one in six organisations would fail to meet the deadline for their business to handle the Year 2000 issue. On the positive side, the survey showed that 8% of organisations had completed their Y2K programme by July 1998 and this would rise to 21% by the end of 1998, and that the private sector was spending five times more per employee than the public sector in fixing the Y2K problem.

Mr Balls concluded by stressing the importance of recognising the role of the Y2K leader in every organisation and telling the audience that he had no intent to panic them - more a wish to ensure that in each company there was no complacency, adequate finance and human resource to tackle the task in hand with, perhaps, some controlled anxiety.