' T WAS THE BIGGEST, BEST-ATTENDED year 2000 conference yet, but it still wasn't enough. "If everyone who should be working on the problem were here, we'd be in Yankee Stadium," said Leon Kappelman, co-chair of the Society for Information Management's (SIM) Y2K Working Group and the Y2K conference's chairman.
More than 1,500 people gathered in New York City in March for SPG's Year 2000 Conference and Expo
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'At the same time, new facets of Y2K continue to emerge, like problems with embedded chips and PCs, IT's lack of experience with contingency planning and widespread concern about how governments and the utilities industry are handling their own Y2K issues.
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'Embedded Systems Dangers
Two sessions directly addressed the issue of Y2K bugs etched into embedded systems, but questions about the risks they pose were sprinkled throughout the conference. In a three-hour workshop on the topic, David Hall, a senior consultant at Cara Corp. in Chicago, said that identifying all the embedded systems throughout an enterprise is difficult, and testing them for compliance is nearly impossible.
"There's been approximately $10 billion in microprocessors manufactured and sold since 1991," Hall said. "And only 10 percent of those have gone into PCs. Finding and fixing the other 90 percent is going to be a pretty big challenge."
Hall recommended that Y2K managers get test data from vendors and then rigorously verify it. Jay Abshier, Y2K manager at Texaco Inc. in Bellaire, Texas, supported that approach. He said that his company had received assurances from an embedded chip's manufacturer that it was compliant, but after Abshier's team performed an assessment of their systems, they found some systems didn't recognize Feb. 29, 2000, as a valid date. "Doing that kind of testing isn't cheap," Abshier said. "And it's something that has to be in your budget for 1999."
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' T WAS THE BIGGEST, BEST-ATTENDED year 2000 conference yet, but it still wasn't enough. "If everyone who should be working on the problem were here, we'd be in Yankee Stadium," said Leon Kappelman, co-chair of the Society for Information Management's (SIM) Y2K Working Group and the Y2K conference's chairman.
More than 1,500 people gathered in New York City in March for SPG's Year 2000 Conference and Expo. The presenters included Kappelman, economist Ed Yardeni and tireless gong-banger Peter de Jager. Each one underscored Kappelman's comment: After more than a year of awareness-raising, too few companies and government agencies are paying enough attention to their Y2K problems.
At the same time, new facets of Y2K continue to emerge, like problems with embedded chips and PCs, IT's lack of experience with contingency planning and widespread concern about how governments and the utilities industry are handling their own Y2K issues.
For these reasons, there was a surreal mood to the conference. Attendees felt that the scope of their projects is expanding as the time frame to complete them is shrinking, and yet it seems that the rest of the world regards Y2K as either a low priority or a simple fix that's not of concern to nontechnical types. Yardeni, the Deutsche Morgan Grenfell economist who has speculated about the possibility of a global recession sparked by Y2K, captured the atmosphere best in his keynote: "I don't know about you, but [Y2K] has been an X Files experience for me. I can't tell if I'm being paranoid, or if the rest of the world is just oblivious. Should I be taking heavy doses of Prozac? Check into the Betty Ford Clinic for Delusional Economists?"
Yardeni's line got a laugh--but it was a very sympathetic one. This audience knew how he felt. It was not an optimistic group.
Embedded Systems Dangers
Two sessions directly addressed the issue of Y2K bugs etched into embedded systems, but questions about the risks they pose were sprinkled throughout the conference. In a three-hour workshop on the topic, David Hall, a senior consultant at Cara Corp. in Chicago, said that identifying all the embedded systems throughout an enterprise is difficult, and testing them for compliance is nearly impossible.
"There's been approximately $10 billion in microprocessors manufactured and sold since 1991," Hall said. "And only 10 percent of those have gone into PCs. Finding and fixing the other 90 percent is going to be a pretty big challenge."
Hall recommended that Y2K managers get test data from vendors and then rigorously verify it. Jay Abshier, Y2K manager at Texaco Inc. in Bellaire, Texas, supported that approach. He said that his company had received assurances from an embedded chip's manufacturer that it was compliant, but after Abshier's team performed an assessment of their systems, they found some systems didn't recognize Feb. 29, 2000, as a valid date. "Doing that kind of testing isn't cheap," Abshier said. "And it's something that has to be in your budget for 1999."
Separately, de Jager, in a keynote address, said that he is considering relinquishing responsibility for his Project Damocles effort. (He has since terminated the project altogether.) De Jager started the project late last year to attempt to bring more attention--and accountability--to the embedded systems issue. But now he's worried that by serving as a conduit for complaints about noncompliant embedded systems he'll be subpoenaed countless times in post-Y2K litigation. "Like everyone else here, I want to avoid the courtroom," he said.
PC Risks
Why haven't PCs been considered part of the Y2K equation? Speaker Karl W. Feilder, CEO and president of Greenwich Mean Time Inc. in Chichester, England, a provider of Y2K PC tools that researches the impact of Y2K on desktop systems, has a few theories. First, he says that few companies are selling tools to assess and fix Y2K problems on PCs relative to the number of vendors focusing on mainframes. Second, there's a psychological issue. "Most senior decision makers grew up with mainframes," Feilder says. "They think people don't do anything useful on a PC. And that's fundamentally wrong." Third, most IT organizations exercise less control over PCs than over other systems. "I spoke with a Baby Bell the other day that thought it had 50,000 PCs," Feilder says, nursing a cafE latte in the lobby bar of the New York Hilton. "They actually had 75,000."
Feilder pointed out that the Y2K problem on PCs doesn't end with the BIOS chip. "That's only 1 percent of the problem," he says. Feilder describes the PC problem as having five layers: hardware, operating systems, software programs, data and data sharing. He recommends addressing each of those layers the same way one would handle the Y2K project for a mainframe system: assessment, triage, conversion and testing.
And companies that allow employees to telecommute have to be concerned not only with PCs in the workplace but with PCs at home. Can organizations afford not to prepare those PCs for the new millennium? "You have to do it," says Feilder. "Otherwise, you wouldn't want to let them connect to your network. It could be seen as legally negligent."
Uncertainty About Utilities
One of the dominant worries at the conference was how the nation's power and telecommunications infrastructure will weather the transition from 1999 to 2000. While most companies take electricity and telecom service for granted, several presenters brought up troubling examples of how even isolated failures can wreak havoc on the business world. Among the anecdotes were discussions of last winter's ice storm in Canada and northern New England, as well as the lengthy power outage in Auckland, New Zealand.
"In my opinion, there is a 100 percent certainty that we will see blackouts as a result of Y2K if current trends continue," said Hall. "How long and how large will they be? I don't know." Hall, a member of the SIM Working Group, also pointed out that power plants of all types are highly dependent on security and safety infrastructures that could fail. "If the local 911 system doesn't work, a nuclear plant can't operate," he observed, noting that regulations require that staff be able to summon firetrucks and ambulances in an emergency.
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