You then ignore the first group (those who'll survive with no treatment) and the last group (those who won't make it anyway) and concentrate all your efforts on those who have a good chance of surviving -- if you get to them in time.

When you take this concept and apply it to computer applications, you should modify it slightly. In the case of the Year 2000 crisis, you're not trying to save the individual applications, you're trying to save your entire organization, which relies on those applications, to perform "business as usual."

Identify your mission critical systems
You should first identify mission critical applications. These are applications upon which the very heart of your business depends. One way to identify your mission critical systems is to look for those that you've pointed to, every time you've had to justify your existence as a technical manager. Mission critical systems are those handful of applications supplying the "motive force" behind your business.

[Component Enterprises is the company that publishes DominoPower. In Component's case, those mission critical systems would be our accounting system, the ad tracking database, the software that generates the journals, and our web site support software. Yours, of course, will be appropriate to your business. --DG]

Identify your lesser systems
The next group of applications you should pay attention to are those which your company could live without for a while (perhaps forever). While their loss would probably severely affect your ability to conduct business, you could get by, hobbled by the loss of key functions, but shipping product and providing basic services. You could make do (albeit perhaps slowly, expensively, and inefficiently).

Finally, identify those systems you run, but don't really need. At first you might respond "We need everything we run! Otherwise we wouldn't be running it!"

My response is that Pareto's 80/20 Rule likely applies to computer systems more than it does to any other human endeavor. 80% of the benefit arises from 20% of the effort. Looked at from the hind end, 80% of what you do, generates less than 20% of the benefit. Yes, the truth hurts. Chin up! It's going to get worse.

Ignore all but mission critical systems
Guess which applications you're going to have to ignore? All applications from all groups but the first, mission critical group. Everything but the mission critical systems is of secondary importance. If you do not have enough resources to save everything, all your efforts, all your resources, all your attention must be focused on getting those mission critical systems operational. Anything else would be poor project management and worse yet, poorer judgment.

Even those mission critical systems contain non-essential functionality. An example springs to mind. I was once told there are 50,000 ways to generate an airline ticket. In other words, there are a multitude of special deals including discounts, charter programs, group rates, stay over Saturday, bring your own meal, bring a meal for the pilot, fly back on a day that doesn't have a Y in it, and so on. Are all these options necessary? Admittedly, the airline must have the capability of generating a ticket, but does it have to do so in so very many creative ways? [Does it have to do it in so many creative ways to survive? --DG]