Publication Date: December 6, 1996

Related articles - The Doomsday Date and It Is Already 2000 at Bank of Boston

Taking Stock of a Time Bomb: Government and the Year 2000

By Sue Mellen

On December 31, 999, people all over Europe crowded into cathedrals to await the end of time. Certain that the world would end with the new year, they wanted to be close to God at the moment of the Apocalypse. Now, as we approach the year 2000, a more tangible disaster may be at hand: According to many analysts, our technology-dependent society—including the government agencies that touch our lives every day—will be crippled unless computer programs worldwide can be made "millennium compliant" in time.

In his travels, Year 2000 specialist Peter de Jager, of de Jager & Co. in Ontario, has found that "65 percent of businesses are still doing nothing about the problem." But while the unfinished business of millennium compliancy is certainly a problem for the private sector, it could be a catastrophe at every level of government, where date-related calculations are crucial to most operations and where projections into the next century are a way of life.

In many government agencies—the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration are good examples—dates are key components in the majority of transactions. And many government programs run on legacy systems, the most difficult and costly to repair.

Meeting the Deadline

It's no secret that the federal government has trouble sticking to deadlines and budgets, especially, it seems, when it comes to information technology. Steve E. Kolodney, director of the Department of Information Services of Washington state, pointed out in a recent address that the Federal Aviation Administration is five years behind schedule and $27 million over budget in a plan to modernize its computers. At the Department of Defense (DOD), a call to accelerate that department's modernization elicited a response from its chief information officer that "the DOD record to date in delivering even one million lines of code on schedule and on budget shows a 100 percent failure rate."

But this is one deadline the federal government—and the American public—can not afford to miss. To quote U.S. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-New York), the ranking minority member on the House Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology: "The cost of failure is high. Systems that deliver services to individuals will not work, and those services will not be delivered. Checks will not arrive on time. Planes will be grounded and ports will be closed."

Estimates for making the myriad agencies and departments of the federal government millennium compliant are universally mind-boggling, with the Gartner Group putting the figure at a staggering $30 billion, out of an estimated $600 billion to solve the problem worldwide. Millions—perhaps billions—of lines of code in systems across the spectrum of government will have to be run, evaluated, and in many cases rewritten to conform to the recommended eight-digit date standard (two digits each for month and day and four digits for the year). Some agencies have ventured deeply into the repair stage, while others are still in the process of evaluating the scope of their problems and determining which systems can be saved and which have depreciated to the point that a massive revamping would be a bad investment.

Toward a Unified Approach

Efforts to create a more unified approach are under way, with a few key people in Washington, D.C., leading the charge. One of these is U.S. Rep. Stephen Horn (R-California), chair of the technology subcommittee. On April 16, he convened an initial hearing to determine the extent of the problem across the federal system. Kevin Schick, research director at the Gartner Group and one of the experts who testified at the hearing, told the subcommittee that federal agencies needed to be "well into the project by October 1997" to allow enough time for evaluating, repairing or replacing and finally testing systems.

After the hearing, Horn and Maloney sent letters to the heads of each federal executive department and 10 additional key agencies asking detailed questions about their progress toward millennium compliancy. Based on replies to the questions, the technology subcommittee composed a department/agency report card.

Big red Fs went to the departments of Energy, Labor and Transportation and to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Defense and Treasury departments only managed Cs. Horn's subcommittee then advised that all agencies begin actively working toward compliancy by January 1, 1997, and that administration of the effort should be centralized, but implementation de-centralized. Individual sections of departments and agencies should take responsibility for making necessary changes "on the ground," the subcommittee suggested.

The Department of Defense, for one, has made considerable progress since receiving its barely passing grade. MITRE, a Massachusetts-based technology think tank, has completed an evaluation of Defense systems and made a series of recommendations. And according to the Defense Department's Year 2000 program coordinator Carla von Bernewitz, the department is now well into the assessment stage, with "pockets of the DOD already involved in testing."

One move toward a more unified federal response has been the establishment of a General Services Administration Web site. The site operates as the government's Year 2000 clearinghouse, with background information, contact names, vendor/contract data and conference schedules available for department and agency use.

The Federal Information Resources Management Policy Council also has jumped into the Year 2000 fray with the creation of an interagency work group to help focus federal efforts. Kathleen Adams, associate commissioner for system design and development at the Social Security Administration, heads up the group. One of those people consistently associated with Year 2000 and government, Adams has experience with the issue dating back to 1989. At that time, Social Security software "broke" when the agency tried to make projections beyond 1999, she says. Adams and her colleagues conducted several pilots to determine the extent of the problem, then began repairing dates across the system. The agency completed its rewrite in August 1995, earning it an "A" with Horn's subcommittee and making Adams one of a select group of Year 2000 gurus.

Another Approach

In the United Kingdom, where both government ministers and private citizens have complained about Britain's slow response to the millennium problem, "the country has done more in four months to resolve the problem than the U.S. has done in the last year-and-one-half," says de Jager.

At the urging of Science and Technology Minister Ian Taylor, the government established on July 31 a Year 2000 task force that brings together business, industry and government interests. Task force members include the Confederation of British Industry, Institute of Directors, Bank of England, Computer Services and Software Association, National Computing Centre, Department of Trade and Industry, and the government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency.

Heading up the public/private consortium is Robin Guenier, who previously served as interim chief executive of the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency. According to the British publication Computer Weekly, Guenier brought the issue to the attention of Deputy Prime Minister Michael Haseltine during a briefing in early June. The magazine reports that, following Guenier's portrayal of the crisis, Haseltine asked, "Why didn't somebody tell me before?"

Back in the States

Like the various federal agencies, individual states are moving at very different speeds to deal with the millennium issue. California, Texas, Nebraska, Washington and Massachusetts are among the most progressive, with Massachusetts currently staffing a Year 2000 team and projecting completion of the project at least 18 months before the end of the millennium.

"I want to have plenty of time for testing. There's too much at stake to take chances," says Massachusetts Comptroller William Kilmartin.

But many in state government are still sitting back, waiting for a miracle cure, says Kolodney of Washington state. Some administrators believe that "a white knight is going to come riding out of the computer industry to solve the problem," he says.

While they wait, the millennium countdown continues.

Sue Mellen writes from Tyngsboro, Mass.

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Peter de Jager is a featured speaker at DCI's Year 2000 Issues & Answers Conference. Please see our latest online brochure for conference and registration information.

For more on de Jager's thoughts on the date-change issue, please see his article, Systemic Triage, in our archive of articles, as well as his Web site, which features a variety of millennium-related information plus a clock with a running countdown to the Year 2000.

Related articles - The Doomsday Date and It Is Already 2000 at Bank of Boston.

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