Y2-Okay.

Ironically, the much-feared Y2K bug didn't wreak havoc. Instead, it became an inadvertent catalyst for technologic innovation. That's because, by mobilizing to stomp out the bug, companies unwittingly built IT departments capable of handling sophisticated enterprise-wide projects. The companies' enterprise-wide thinking and integration applications -- aimed at extermination -- actually paved the way for powerful innovations to be adopted years sooner than anyone expected. Chief among these: on-line customer self-service and electronic data interchange between companies.

"In some ways, the Y2K bug was like the space program in the '60s and '70s, which spun off technologies that transformed American business," says Mitchell Gross, president and CEO of Mobius Management Systems, a provider of web-based software solutions headquartered in Rye, N.Y. "It forced companies to create information technology teams that could implement enterprise-wide software solutions. Companies introduced ERP systems to integrate different functionalities that previously had been managed by often incompatible computing solutions. And integration is enabling these innovations to take off. It's all part of a larger movement toward enterprise computing and integration of diverse functional areas. Many people think of the Internet as a place for retailers such as Amazon.com, but the interchange of data and functional capability within companies and between them dwarfs the retail potential of the Internet. It's changing American business in a wholesale way. And Y2K was the watershed in this change."