Schwartz said that the IT department had apparently not "been keeping up with patches as we should have," which means more work for him and his staff now. "I don't think it was really on the radar until a month ago, when someone happened to see it. We really got caught. We should have been more proactive."

Cappelli, who recently co-wrote a research report on the issue with two other Gartner analysts, said the DST changes will be a "small-to-medium problem" for most companies. "It is nowhere near as huge as Y2k potentially could have been," because no one really knew exactly how IT systems would react when the calendars switched to Jan. 1, 2000, he said. "With Y2k, it's potential apocalyptic character was that it was insidious, that we didn't know what bizarre conventions could have been inside applications."

The DST issue is different because system shutdowns and other complications are not as likely as they were during the Y2k crisis, Cappelli said. "The severity is not as profound," he said, adding that that might explain corporate sluggishness to address this year's DST change. "Many IT professionals thought they were burned by Y2k because the world didn't blow up, and it caused them to downplay the fact that some [DST] work needed to get done."

As a result, many Gartner clients are just now evaluating their IT systems. "We really watched it as a slow trickle starting in late August, starting with many financial services firms," Cappelli said. There was a noticeable jump in concern in December, and now the efforts across the industry appear to be in full-blown mode, he added.

"About 70% of the Global 2000 have some kind of activities in place, and that will increase in the next month," he said. "In December, it was about 40%. We probably caught ourselves just in time."