Whatever Happened To Y2K? Using A Premier Crisis Management Prototype To Study Post 9/11 Preparedness

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, re-search 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 ex-perience 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 cam-paign. The $600 billion debugging regime was a milestone achievement in information sys-tems, and also provides a contemporary opportunity for critical analysis in fecund research areas: the economic impacts of massive information and communication technology invest-ments, 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 th