ITAA's Year 2000 Outlook
December 4, 1998 Volume 3, No. 44
Published by the Information Technology Association of America, Arlington, VA
Bob Cohen, Editor bcohen@itaa.org
Read in over 80 countries around the world
ITAA's Year 2000 Outlook is published every Friday to help all organizations
deal more effectively with the Year 2000 software conversion. To create a
subscription to this free publication, please visit ITAA on the web at
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ITAA's Year 2000 Outlook is sponsored in part by CACI International Inc., DMR
Consulting Group Inc., and Y2Kplus
Alaska Bears Down on Impending Y2K Realities
From in-door plumbing to Internet connectivity, technology has helped deliver
modern conveniences to tens of thousands of Alaskans, even those in villages so
remote that they can only be reached by air or water. But as state officials
are beginning to realize, introducing these outback residents to the comforts of
the information age come with a hidden price: the millennium bug.
If anyone is handing out prizes to state governments for early starts on the
Year 2000 conversion, Alaska is probably safe skipping the ceremony. Alaska
launched its Y2K Task Force in February of this year and appointed its statewide
program manager in July. The state legislature is yet to appropriate dollar one
for the remediation of state government systems. When the Alaska Public Utility
Commission asked certified public utilities and pipeline carriers last summer to
report their Y2K readiness, 70 percent of these companies ignored the request.
But Alaska's Y2K fortunes are nothing if not the proverbial good news/bad news
story. Next month the legislature may reverse its course and pass a $16 million
"quick capital appropriation." Also, when Gov. Tony Knowles appointed Bob Poe
to head up Alaska's statewide Y2K effort, he created the assignment as a cabinet
level post, not burying it in the state's bureaucratic permafrost. Agencies,
meanwhile, have not been completely frozen in place, waiting as elected
officials get their Year 2000 act together. Rather, Poe estimates that 65
percent of the state's mission critical applications are fixed and ready to be
tested (testing cannot begin until an upgrade can be completed on one of the
state's mainframe computers). Poe says 89 information systems are mission
critical to the life, health, safety and economic well being of Alaskans, and
only two have been identified as "code red" for their high risk of potential
failure.
Alaska would be just another state that has very slowly come up to speed on the
Year 2000 if it were not also the last American frontier, a 586,400-square-mile
land mass complete with caribou, polar bears, wolverines, walruses, and much
else that is special to this part of the world. In fact, Alaskans tend to talk
about anyplace other than Alaska as "the outside." Perhaps it's this feeling of
disconnectedness, both in cultural perspective and geographic reality, that
makes the state's Y2K story different.
For instance, as many Americans are just beginning to come to grips with the
possibility of disruptions and outages, native Alaskans have been there and done
that. These people rely on the same disposable diapers and perishable foods as
their neighbors in the lower 48 states. But given a land where wind chills can
hit -100 degrees F, they also know what it means to miss a shipment or two of
life's latest essentials. The good news is that Alaskans consider themselves
rugged and can handle it.
The bad news is that they may have to. Alaska imports virtually everything but
cold air from outside its borders. Long before midnight rides to 7-Eleven
convenience stores were invented, a "milk run" to many towns in Alaska meant
milk arriving once a week on a barge. So it is no accident that Anchorage
International Airport is one of the busiest air cargo facilities in the world.
Still, Alaskans face a five to six week turnaround for orders that might take
one to three days in the rest of the country.
Will Alaska become the ultimate case study in Y2K supply chain management?
Poe says that Alaskans know what it means to have a system fail and they
prepare for it. Given the state's dependence on outside suppliers, he says
citizens need to be prudent about their restock timeframes. Shortages that may
last a week in Seattle could linger two or three in Alaska, he says.
Most Alaskans will ride out the Y2K rollover in Anchorage. Almost half the
state's population is located in the Anchorage metropolitan area. The other
half is spread over a geographic area over twice the size of Texas. Resupplying
that other half is not a trivial undertaking even under the best of
circumstances. If Y2K causes intermodal transportation systems to go haywire,
the situation could quickly deteriorate.
State officials are aware of this possibility, particularly as problems may
impact power generation and telecommunications. Again, good news/bad news
rules. Alaska does not participate in the North American power grid, so
cascading brown outs are not of major concern. That's good as far as it goes.
But Alaskan winters yield just three or so hours of sunlight each day. Instead
of massive regional power companies, the state depends on hundreds of smaller
hydro, diesel, coal and gas-fired utilities, producing roughly the amount of
electricity required to service local energy needs. The bad news is that these
operators share the plight of small businesses everywhere when it comes to the
Year 2000 repair-scant resources, business distractions, and inadequate
information. Again, Poe says Alaskans are by definition hardy and can handle a
certain amount of power disruption. That, he says, is what all those wood
stoves and kerosene lamps are for.
Even if Alaska's lights stay lit, however, telecommunications problems could
prove damaging, dangerous, even deadly, particular in the bush. While Alaska's
native population may not have topped roads, they do have much in the way of top
notch water and wastewater treatment facilities, power generators, airports,
medical services, schools and the like. Many functions within these facilities,
such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning, are operated from remote
locations via telecom connection to a black box device.
"Telecommunications holds the state together," Poe said. "If it fails, we have
significant problems. We have contingency back ups, but not good ones."
One major equipment concern involves water and wastewater. In 1992, a resident
of Hooper Bay, Alaska died after drinking over-fluoridated water. According to
Poe, the poisoning was accidental and caused by an untrained local operator, not
a malfunctioning computer or faulty phone line. But the episode highlights the
extreme importance of being able to maintain remote telecom connections to the
intelligent devices controlling key functions within these facilities-as well as
to assure the proper functioning of the black boxes themselves.
"If electric power goes down," says Dusty Finley, Y2K Coordinator for the
Alaska Department of Military and Veteran Affairs, "multi-million dollar sewage
treatment facilities will freeze in a matter of hours. Recovery will be
disproportionately expensive."
Finley works for the adjutant general and is responsible for planning the Alaska
National Guard's emergency response to the Year 2000. In particular, he
coordinates with local area planning committees to raise Y2K awareness.
According to Finley, to the extent that work at the village level is being
conducted at all, "any focus is system and IT specific. Projects don't exist as
coherent, coordinated activities across much of the infrastructure spectrum."
While Finley is likewise concerned about supply chain, telecom and electricity
generation issues, he breaks the problem into the systems impacting the life,
safety, health and economic well-being of state citizens: airport
communication, air and sea navigation, local communications repeaters, power
generation and distribution, earth station communications interfaces, local
telecom switches, emergency response/911, health clinic radio communication,
heating control systems, remote monitor environmental controls, water
purification and distribution, electronic archival of community records, fuel
storage monitoring and transfer, refrigeration systems, and emergency response
workstations.
"The perception at the village level is that they're not that vulnerable,"
Finley said. He indicates that while Alaska is well prepared to respond to
simultaneous crisis situations in one or two communities, "if multiple sites at
multiple locations have problems, that's a significant challenge."
Finley has interacted with just 30-40 local leaders and there are hundreds of
villages across the state. The real world considerations of money, time and
distance make his outreach efforts difficult. The state's entire emergency
preparedness organization consists of 34 employees. Coordination with other
state agencies, the service branches, and the Federal Emergency Management
Agency will be critical to gain the necessary traction. To this end, Finley is
working with Poe and others to conduct regional tabletop planning exercises,
starting in February.
When talking about native villages hundreds of miles from the nearest city, such
planning exercises will no doubt have their limits. In his local visits, Finley
says no one is disagreeing with his assessment of the situation; rather, these
native people are beginning to simply resign themselves to whatever happens-to
the impending reality: "When you are talking about 15 technologically advanced
systems, you get overwhelmed real quick," Finley says.
Pipeline Gets Pumping on Y2K Program
Roughly 20 percent of America's domestic crude oil moves down the Trans Alaska
Pipeline System, a 48-inch wide, 800 mile long facility stretching from Prudhoe
Bay to Valdez, Alaska. The terrain, incorporating three major mountain chains,
is one of the most treacherous on earth; likewise, with temperatures dropping as
low as -65 degrees F, weather conditions are among the most hostile anywhere.
The pipeline itself is one of the most politically charged infrastructure
projects in U.S. history. Then Vice President Spiro Agnew broke a tie vote in
Congress in 1973 to allow the initiative to proceed. Even though 21 years have
passed since the first oil flowed, a phalanx of environmentalists, community
groups and federal and state regulators remain on constant alert for the
slightest sign of trouble in this 1.3 million barrel a day fuel pump.
Overlay on this set of challenges an elaborate choreography which involves
companies of all shapes and sizes producing oil, purchasing oil, pumping oil out
of the ground on Alaska's North Slope and down the pipeline to storage tanks in
Valdez or on to tankers in Valdez harbor. The process requires a high level of
successful interaction among oil producers, shippers, the pipeline and marine
terminal operator, shipping companies, tankers en route, port authorities, the
Coast Guard, and other actors.
Layer on layer of complexity. Risks managed on a daily basis. And then along
comes the Year 2000 software problem, introducing new difficulties and possible
disruptions into numerous dimensions of the overall operation. In the
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system that controls the operation of
the pipeline. In the control system components that meter flows, gauge
pressure, open and shut gate valves, and perform other operations in the field
and at the marine terminal. In the mainframe applications governing data center
operations. In work management. And in telecommunications, networks and
desktop apps.
Enter the world of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, operator of the Trans
Alaska Pipeline System and Derek McGowan, manager of the organization's Year
2000 program. With one-fifth of the nation's domestic oil supply flowing down a
single, $9 billion pipeline, McGowan is up to his eyebrows in what is arguably
one of the world's most demanding and politically sensitive Year 2000 conversion
programs. As McGowan himself points out, if the pipeline stops…it stops-no
backup system stands ready to take its place. In a sense, the pipeline is the
single thread that ties together a vast, multi-billion dollar crude oil
infrastructure.
That makes the Alyeska approach to the Year 2000 issue even more interesting.
Alyeska Pipeline is a consortium company established by seven major owner oil
companies. Alyeska has experienced two significant reorganizations in the past
four years. Downsizing and a redeployment of operations employees from the
company's Anchorage headquarters to field locations has caused some loss of
institutional knowledge. Alyeska's Year 2000 program did not begin to really
get pumping with fixes to the company's mission and business information systems
until May of this year.
Big program. Lots at stake. Early this year, Alyeska tapped McGowan to prime
the pump on its Year 2000 efforts. By doing so, the company turned to a program
manager not an IT pro. McGowan is on loan from British Petroleum, and at
Alyeska he entered something of a time warp. Since the pipeline has been in
operation, management has emphasized integrity and safe operations, not state of
the art hardware and software functionality. Thus, the firm's COBOL programs
fell two or three versions out of date. Many systems are obsolete by today's
standards. While oil companies constantly modernize and, as a result, add Y2K
capable components, Alyeska is spending $24 million to repair its existing
systems.
Coming from behind, McGowan is moving quickly to thaw the capital investment
landscape and accelerate the firm's Y2K progress. He has organized his squad of
approximately 40 remediators into seven teams: SCADA, pipeline systems
(controls, facilities, security), work management, commercial applications,
telecom, vendor readiness, and marine terminal. Systems have been prioritized
into mission critical, business and operations critical and non-critical
categories and repairs to applications on the business side of the house are
well underway. Detailed assessment of control systems is nearly complete, so
that remediation can start later this month. McGowan says that the company will
complete its mission and business critical systems renovation by June of 1999,
including testing and implementation.
Part of the problem is getting the company's arms around what is broken. For
instance, McGowan turned his program manager's skepticism on the initial
information provided about the telecom and network system components. "I asked,
'what are we doing about our networks?' We were told, 'They are OK.' We
investigated. We asked, 'What about the software routers and switches?' We
suddenly had a short list of Y2K sensitive equipment. We brought in our teams to
go through our telecommunications systems by components and by category. We had
a much longer list. Year 2000 is a discovery process. Most companies begin
their Year 2000 programs with a lot of uncertainty, not a fixed scope of work.
Y2K is the opposite of a typical program. You start out big and manage it
down."
The company is beginning to "manage down" in other areas, aided in part by a Y2K
methodology which emphasizes independent scrutiny of work products as well as
internal peer reviews. McGowan emphasizes team ownership of the Y2K program
plan and thorough review to assure that, while approaches may be tailored to
meet individual circumstances, all completed work meets a common baseline for
quality and consistency.
Alyeska is also gearing up its supply chain management and contingency planning
activity. Next month, the firm will begin site visits with its mission and
business critical suppliers. Straight talk will be important. Shortages in
fuel oil, for instance, could put the pipeline's on-site caretakers on thin ice.
The company operates seven pump stations used to push oil down the line. These
wilderness outposts are also home to the Alyeska employees who service and
repair the pipeline and respond to emergencies. Virtual mini cities, each pump
station operates its own power, water and sewage treatment facilities,
communications systems, medical service and fire department. The fuel for these
facilities is trucked in from suppliers. Similarly, shortages in the
availability of Drag Reducing Agent, a polymer added to the oil to increase line
capacity, could be costly. DRA is shipped to Alaska from suppliers in Texas and
Oklahoma via rail. So Alyeska must explore its critical Y2K interdependencies
with both the manufacturer and the rail system.
McGowan says he will be sitting down this month with the major players in the
Trans Alaska Pipeline System "value chain" to discuss contingency planning-a
topic he says raises more questions than answers. But just getting the dialogue
started will be a major step in the right direction. The key will be to
identify the fall back positions each partner must be prepared to adopt in order
to protect the overall integrity of this giant pipeline economy.
Hardly surprising. In Alaska, new millennium or no, preparation is always the
name of the game. |
