Leader: Payment migration deadline looms

Journalists always find that deadlines concentrate the mind, even if we occasionally like to give our editors a scare by leaving it to the last minute when filing stories.

But it seems there are 35,000 daredevil companies out there who are intent on cutting it even finer with their Bacstel-IP migrations than the laziest hack ever would with their articles.

If your staff have the hassle of being paid in cash or by cheque because you didn't get round to sorting this out, then you might wish you had headed for the hills yourself.

This lack of action by so many companies is strange considering the amount of time they have had to get ready. After all, big users such as The Bank of New York have long planned their migrations in order to streamline their systems and benefit from the increased security.

There are no benefits to leaving it as late as possible - only risks that you won't be able to hit the deadline.

As the average migration will take around three months, and there are - oops - just over three months to go until the deadline, if you aren't going to act soon you could end up in trouble.

So why delay? Don't expect your bank to do the job for you - and if you don't act soon your software supplier may well be too busy to help either.

This isn't going to be an IT project deadline that captures the public imagination in the same way that Y2K did.

And, as a result, it's unlikely that many people will be heading to the mountains with a supply of food and clean water for fear of what happens when the deadline passes.

But then again, if your staff have the hassle of being paid in cash or by cheque because you didn't get round to sorting this out, then you might wish you had headed for the hills yourself.