This is what pollycrackers CAN'T understand! <Passport to Disaster: How the British Passport Experience Is Prophetic
y2ktimebomb.com
Ian Hugo is with Taskfore 2000, the original y2k awareness organization anywhere. He argues here that the monumental foul-up at the British passport office is indicative of the kinds of failures that will be universal in 2000 or earlier. Multiple, simultaneous distuptions are the threat, he says. It's not a single glitch that is the problem. It is the simultaneity of lots of them.
The problem is implementing the supposedly compliant systems. As these go on-line, breakdowns will occur. Comprehensive testing has not been conducted in most cases.
The government, he says, lied about the cause. We can expect more of the same.
Westergaard's site (July 5).
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. . . For anyone not familiar with what's going on at the UK Passport Office, a backlog of passport issuing work has built up to the point where it is taking months for people to get passports issued or renewed, with obvious implications for overseas trips, whatever their purpose. Passport Offices are taking on an extra 400 staff, time guarantees for the fast-track process have been dropped, a new (free) two-year extension to passports is being made available through Post Offices and various other emergency measures are being rushed through.
The fiasco results from late implementation of a passport issuing system, PASS, to replace the previous non-Y2K-compliant PIMIS system, plus a change in Government regulations relating to passport requirements for 16 year-olds, who now have to have their own passports rather than being included on their parents'. The system replacement is a project acknowledged by the Passport Agency in their returns to Cabinet Office as having Y2K relevance but being managed outside the main Y2K program.
I've consistently maintained that such projects pose a major risk of disruption but that individual project failures alone will not necessarily result in disruption to services. In this case, rather than a second more or less simultaneous IT failure, what has impacted the situation has been the results of a change to Government legislation. I've commented in my public sector reports since September last year that a change freeze on legislation affecting IT systems, analogous to change freezes being self-imposed by private industry, should be imposed by the Government. This advice has been ignored and we now see the consequences.
In my failure curve paper, Predicting Year 2000 Disruption, published by Taskforce 2000 in conjunction with the UK National Computing Centre in April this year, I predicted that the major risk of disruption would be from multiple simultaneous rather than individual impacts on a single organization. I also predicted that the early signs of such a process of attrition were likely to be visible from the middle of this year. The Passport Agency fiasco confirms all these predictions. . . .
Firstly, I argued that major system re-installs, upgrades or replacements made necessary because of Year 2000 offered more risk of disruption than many (maybe most) kinds of date-logic failure. The UK Passport Office has suffered no date logic failure; failure to replace a non-compliant system to schedule is part of the reason for the fiasco.
Secondly, I argued that a single impact was unlikely to cause externally noticeable disruption. The reason is simple: such impacts occur not infrequently all the time. . . .
It's perhaps worth noting that the danger from legislation is not from new Acts being passed now but from changes to legislation passed months (or years) ago that are being implemented now. I'd point out also that although this has happened in the UK, the scenario can easily apply in any country.
Thirdly, the UK Passport Agency very kindly confirmed the timing I predicted. In fact, I have been becoming less certain that my timing predictions were right. The suggestion that such scenarios would start showing from the middle of this year was based on the assumption that large organizations with late programs would be scheduling re-installs, upgrades and replacements for June. My last reading of public sector revisions to plans suggests that may be too early; many are not scheduled until September, so failures won't be apparent until then. Which, of course, means there should be more of the same to follow, only later and with less time for recovery.
As a final point, note that nobody has got killed and nothing has exploded. What we have is a large mess but one that affects only people who need a new passport. For coincidental messes, and whatever their consequences may be, we're going to have to wait a few months. . . .
I think that if the Home Office wishes to continue to deny any Y2K-related involvement, it has to explain why the Passport Agency for which it is responsible has been lying about the work it is doing and the reasons for it to Cabinet Office. And I think that Siemens Business Systems has to explain why what it claims to have agreed with the Passport Agency does not accord with what the Minister responsible for that Agency is publicly saying. . . .
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