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y2ktoday.com
INTERVIEW with John Koskinen 8/12/99
Author: Scott Johnson, y2ktoday Editor
John Koskinen is the Chairman of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion. As such, he is often described as the Clinton Administration's "Y2K Czar," as he is responsible not only for the coordination of the federal government's massive remediation effort, but also for the management of potential Y2K disruptions here and abroad. We have spoken with Mr. Koskinen on several occasions at press conferences and congressional hearings; last week, we sat down with him at his office in the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House in Washington, DC.
y2ktoday: If you knew what you know now a couple of years ago, would you have taken this job?
John Koskinen: Well, there have been moments when the answer would clearly be "no,” in the sense that this has obviously been an almost 24-hour-a-day job for a year and a half. But, as somebody who's spent 25 years managing turnarounds of large failed enterprises and managing chaos, it's been the greatest opportunity that I've ever had to see if I could reorganize a lot of things at one time. So, if I got asked to do it again, I'd do it in a minute.
y2ktoday: It probably has taught you a lot about how things work in general.
Koskinen: Well, that's right. As I said at a meeting yesterday, I now have more useless pieces of trivia, like how many water districts there are in the United States, and how Russian-designed nuclear plants work, than you can shake a stick at. And that's been a fascinating part of it. And it's also been a great opportunity to make a difference. When you're a little kid, you always think it would be fun to be involved in some global challenge. While I'm just a small piece in the puzzle, it is fascinating to be involved in what is, in fact, a global as well as national effort to minimize, as much as we can, disruptions from what is a real problem.
y2ktoday: I'm going to read you a couple of quotes from Capers Jones, one of the world's most respected researchers in the study of software project efficiency. He told us:
As of this year, 1999, about a third of the problems that are occurring are being found in software that nominally was repaired, tested, and put back into service. But we are visibly less than 100 percent efficient in finding date problems and testing them.
He also said that he saw a "false sense of security” in the federal government's assurances that mission-critical systems will be okay, and that at least fifteen percent of all software applications will not be fixed in time. I want to read you one more quote from Capers Jones:
About fifty percent of large software projects either run late or are cancelled. We know that, and you probably know it, too. But if you looked at the reported status of these projects ninety days before the nominal delivery date, you would reach the impression that none of them were going to run late, because they were all supposed to be under control and moving right along. But, in fact, half of them didn't make it.
In light of this assessment and the assessments of people like Ed Yourdon and the Gartner Group – and in light of your own statement back on March 31 of the historic difficulty the government has had, in the past, in "designing, implementing, and upgrading systems" -- how can you account for what appears to be amazing and unprecedented progress on the part of the Federal government?
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