Businesses have now reached the "eleventh hour" in the Y2K problem, and should be concentrating on their communications and their contingency plans, conferences in Dublin and Ennis, Co Clare, will hear this week.
Mr Peter de Jager, a leading Y2K specialist, will call on companies to release information about their state of readiness, rather than keeping it secret.
"If you are a bank and you have done your job and taken care of the problem, you need to let people know that, because a lot of organisations haven't taken care of it, and there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty out there," Mr de Jager said yesterday.
Even those businesses that have prepared should also have contingency plans, he added.
"You have to ask yourself the question: What if there's something you missed? What if there's something you did but isn't going to work 100 per cent? What's your alternative strategies for when things fail?" he said.
He said that despite the publicity surrounding the Y2K problem, there were still companies that had adopted an "ostrich" approach.
"There are the people who say that this is all hype, all exaggeration - and there is a tremendous amount of hype and exaggeration around the Year 2000 - but to say that it is all hype is absolutely wrong," he said.
"A lot of small businesses have taken the attitude that, firstly, this is a big-company issue only, and secondly, that Bill Gates will solve this,' he added.
He said that while some countries - such as the United States, Canada and Britain - were reasonably well-prepared for Y2K others were hopelessly behind.
"The absolute laggards are Russia and Japan," Mr de Jager added. "Japan is normally a country that looks very far out into the future - they have 50 year plans for everything. But there is a culture in Japan where you do not bring bad news to management - it's called losing face - so that the bottom echelon of an organisation does not send information up to management."
Also, he says, Japanese business tends not to use the individual specialists and consultants that sounded the warning signals in other developed countries.
He says he is not sure exactly how ready Irish companies' systems are for the new millennium, but has some evidence to suggest the issue has so far not always been taken as seriously as it should have been . At the conferences, he is likely to call on firms to release detailed information on the measures they have taken.
The Moving Towards Zero conference is in the Conrad Hotel, Dublin this Wednesday morning, and the West County Hotel, Ennis, on Thursday evening. Information is available from Gerard Sweeney PR on (065) 684-1300.
