The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2004: §3444 Home Papers/Indices prev (§3443) Next (§3445)

Sat, Nov 6, 4:00 - 4:25, Narragansett Room Paper (refereed)

Recommended Citation: Chepaitis, E V. Whatever Happened to Y2k? Using a Premier Crisis Management Prototype to Study Post 9/11 Preparedness. In The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2004, v 21 (Newport): §3444. ISSN: 1542-7382.

Whatever Happened to Y2k? Using a Premier Crisis Management Prototype to Study Post 9/11 Preparedness

Refereed

9 pages

Elia V. Chepaitis    [a1] [a2]
Information Systems and Operations Management
Fairfield University    [u1] [u2]
Fairfield, Connecticut, USA    [c1] [c2]

Few topics interest students as much as emergency prevention and preparedness, particularly since the release of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations in the summer of 2004. This paper describes how the Millennium Crisis can be used to add models, linearity, context, research directions, and depth in this area. The author examines the pedagogical relevance of the features, impacts, contextual analysis, research opportunities, and lessons of the Y2K experience in emergency management discussions. The Year 2000 crisis was a unique maintenance problem, not only of lasting importance for the information systems profession, but also for economic, socio-cultural, and political impacts. Invaluable lessons can be gleaned from this ubiquitous, temporal, costly, and successful campaign. The $600 billion debugging regime was a milestone achievement in information systems, and also provides a contemporary opportunity for critical analysis in fecund research areas: the economic impacts of massive information and communication technology investments, the acceleration of trends in systems analysis and design such as enterprise resource planning, and, most of all, for the implosion or dismantling of preparedness programs and the implications for post- 9/11 crisis response and management. Numerous features of the Y2K campaign can be re-examined by students, academics, and practitioners, and perhaps resurrected--particularly collaboration across organizations to prevent or manage systems failures. Yet, Y2K has hardly been examined by scholars, policy makers, or disaster preparedness think tanks since the Millennium. This paper surveys first, the importance of Y2K for crisis management studies, and second, the significance of the popular perception that the Y2K crisis was exaggerated. The author briefly describes the available literature, the utility of Y2K as a stimulating addendum for EM classes in view of 9/11, and suggests areas for further investigations into emergency management models and opportunities.

Keywords: Y2K, crisis prevention, collaboration, prototype, emergency management, EM

Read this refereed paper in Adobe Portable Document (PDF) format. (9 pages, 411 K bytes)
Preview this refereed paper in Plain Text (TXT) format. (30 K bytes)

CDpic
Comments and corrections to
webmaster@isedj.org