cory hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather Report #110
February 4, 1999 - 330 days to go. WRP110
kiyoinc.com $2.50 Cover Price.
(c) 1999 Cory Hamasaki - I grant permission to distribute and
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reproduced in its entirety. You may optionally quote an individual
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--------------------tearline -----------------
In this issue:
1. Preparedness
2. Time
3. Contingencies
4. Y2K Contest
5. Obit - Bill McKee
6. CCCC
Sighting -- Preparedness Spreading --
Notes from the field: Week 1, Feb. 1999
by Cynic
Disclaimer: The reported incidents are personal observations and
verification is not available on the web.
Last week I was at the Mega-Ultra-Mart roaming the aisles. I took a
break from perusing the battalion-sized packages of hot cocoa
and 55 gal. barrels of ketchup to wander over to the tools section.
There in the middle of the aisle was a forklift with a pallet of
electrical generators. Also there were several knots of people, trying
to look disinterested while the operator eased the load down and
cut the restraining bands. Every one of those 20, and any other,
smaller gensets was gone in less than 5 minutes.
Seems the local Red Cross had announced the day before that prudent
folks should have 1-2 week's supplies of water and food
along with an alternative cooking source in preparation for
you-know-what.
I wandered on over to the food section again, and there were the same
folks, gensets on their flatbed carts buying 50# bags of rice
and beans. Maybe they're plannin' an outdoor chili cookout or sumthin.
Point: At this time national mail/phone order companies like Harbor
Freight are running at least a 6-week non-committal backorder
on gensets, heaters and related "disaster" equipment. Local companies
have told me that the companies that manufacture gensets are
cutting off orders by 2nd quarter because they won't be able to fill
them. The gensets I saw sold were using Tecumseh engines,
usually the last tier supplier. Honda and Briggs & Stratton are
already allocated out.
Conclusions: If you want a generator before the end of the year, you'd
better buy it now. If you wait:
It will cost a LOT more as supply diminishes and demand increases.
On the other hand, if you wait until after mid-year 2000, and nothing
much happens, there will be an absolute glut of gensets with
low hours on them and you'll get one CHEAP.
Either scenario is possible.
When it comes to predictions, it is especially difficult when the
future is involved.
As for me, I figured a genset was cheap insurance (hope I'll have
enough gas). Yep, you guessed it. I glommed on to one of those
6.2kW babies in the tool aisle. Got plenty of beans & rice (and air
freshener) too. Lotsa propane for the camp stoves/lanterns as a
backup. Worst case, I have to use this stuff to help my family and
neighbors to live. Best case, I have a lot of cool camping gear.
Hope to see y'all on the other side.
1999 Cynic
This article is published as part of Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather
Report and may be reproduced under the same terms and
conditions. All other rights reserved to the author.
Geekspeaks -- Time --
Let me preface this rather gloomy scenario with a little about my
biography. I have over 21 years mainframe IT experience
specialising in realtime computer operations, and assembler coverage
programming, in both airline, railway and banking
TPF/VM/MVS systems. I have worked extensively with mainframe heavy
iron in the UK, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia and the
USA. Companies include British Airways, SNCF, Amadeus, Saudia,
Continental, American Airlines and VISA. I believe my
extensive experience, both internationally and domestically, gives me
the necessary background to feel comfortable with the
accuracy of these figures, very disheartening and alarming that these
conclusions admittedly are.
Around The World In 180 Days
As a young boy growing up in England I remember reading and being
enthralled by "Around the World In 80 Days", and it certainly
acted as one of the catalysts for my love of travel and adventure in
later life. I have subsequently managed to see many of those
places and cultures that Phileas Fogg and his loyal French valet
Passepartout saw, and am thankful for those wonderful experiences.
Unlike our hero Phileas in Jules Verne's classic novel, we have a
little more than 80 days to fix all our systems around the world.
Unfortunately, unlike Phileas, who wagered twenty thousand pounds that
he could circle the globe in 80 days or less, we have left
The Reform Club too late to complete our own vital world mission
before the clock strikes midnight. You can wager on it.
We have run out of time to fix this mess.
The US will not make it in time. The "rest of the world" has no
chance. None whatsoever.
Don't believe me???
By my reckoning, as of the 1st of February 1999, we have approximately
220 working days left to get every single entity on earth
up to speed. Let's take the USA, for example, as it historically has
the lowest amount of vacation days in the world. (I'm purposely
not addressing other countries as they will be substantially worse in
many regards than the USA. e.g. Saudi Arabia takes circa 3
months off per year, Ramadan plus regular vacation. France takes the
month of August off every year plus 15 public holidays, plus
strikes (their national sport...) - you get the picture...)
220 days. Factor in public holidays. 210. Factor in sickness. 200.
Factor in vacation time. Two weeks in the late summer and a
week or two at Christmas. This at precisely the worst time from a
remediation and testing viewpoint. Call it 20 days vacation per
year. This leaves us with 180 working days. You could also factor in
Monday mornings and Friday afternoons in most shops, and
water cooler and fag breaks and long lunches and burn-out and, and,
and... the unknown factor if you wish...
So - about <180 days is all we have left to fix everything in the USA.
Oh boy.
I thought this was quite bad enough until I received an e-mail from
Paul Milne, and I quote:
"You need to add one more thing. Productivity. You are assuming 100%.
Think about Monday morning post mortems of football
games, meetings, funerals, hand waiving sessions, other ancillary down
time. If you factor in an 80% productivity factor then you
really only have 144 days left instead of 180."
The remediation has already failed. It is not conjecture or
speculation. We are going down and we are going down hard."
Thanks Paul, ever the eternal optimist (
On the plus side - there may be overtime and death marches for geeks.
Contract geeks may not take a vacation. Never
underestimate the power of contract rates, overtime rates and a
positive work ethic! However, a tired geek is not a good or careful
remediator. It will not work. Entities have seriously underestimated
the scope of the problem. Testing has all but gone out the
window for many of them. Some have yet to start on anything, they have
not the Fogg-iest clue (. Sorry, couldn't resist.
We have a finite deadline. As that deadline approaches and it dawns on
the grunts in the trenches that they are not going to make it,
self-preservation instincts will inevitably kick in. And that
all-American work ethic and company loyalty (if it was ever there)
will
vanish in an instant. There will be geek epiphanies en masse.
So you must also factor in the great geek exodus from the cities (for
I am one) late next year. I will NOT be at a mainframe site in a
big city at rollover unless there is a helicopter standing by to fly
me home and I am paid in advance in American Eagles. Of course
here I'm being facetious. What company will provide a Bell JetRanger
for a bunch of tired, worried, scruffy geeks? Who would
want to be in the air after rollover anyway other than John Travolta?
Can you eat gold coins? Would you trust ATC computers? Do
JetRangers have embedded chips?
I therefore believe we are in a very realistic band of 150-180 working
days left for remediation in the USA. It could be more, just,
but realistically you have to look at the lower end of the spectrum.
The situation will constantly fluctuate throughout '99, this will
further erode the 150-180 working day paradigm I suggested - just wait
and see. I have no doubt that this band will be adversely
impacted by factors yet to emerge.
Unlike Phileas Fogg, our time, alas, will have expired.
There will be no happy endings at The Reform Club...
We will have failed world-wide to reform those two digits...
Only one byte at THIS apple...
Less than 180 days. Maybe much less. Face it.
(c) 1999 Andy Rowland
This article is published as part of Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather
Report and may be reproduced under the same terms and
conditions. All other rights reserved to the author.
Enterprise -- Contingencies --
PUBLIC SECTOR VS PRIVATE SECTOR CONTINGENCY PLANNING
It's a matter of (organizational) life and death.
By Jean-Francois Orsini, Ph.D.
The web is a generous mama and offers several Contingency Plans for
the scared children in search of the reassuring signature of
the US Navy, the GAO (Government Accounting Office), Global 2000 (a
world-wide coordinating group of companies in the
finance industry) and the North American Electric Reliability Council
(NAERC), among others, on the page of Contingency Plans,
freely downloadable from the web.
But these free plans can be poison. They can kill a company even more
surely than if it did not have a plan.
As time runs at accelerating speed and its whitewater river rushes
towards the 1/1/2000 big falls, more and more organizations are
realizing that their Plan A - remediation of the original software
code - will not be completed on time. Some of these organizations
have a Plan B that is a simplified or fallback computer system. But
this also is not a sure thing as companies are reluctant to
thoroughly test them on-line and/or they realize that testing these
Plans B without testing the whole sphere of the systemic
dependencies of the company might not be very realistic.
Increasingly, organizations understand the value of a Contingency Plan
as they can appreciate the need to be backed against a
reliably solid wall and be able to turn around and fight the messy
situation in which the ugly bug will have put them.
In a spirit of thrift as well as out of concern to save time,
organizations are tempted to utilize the Contingency Plans freely
available
on the WWW.
Among the flurry of activities that are more of a bureaucratic type
than of substantive quality - such as setting up teams, assigning
responsibilities of report writing etc, the GAO Contingency Plan
states in paragraph 1.3 "Analyze agency business plans and work
with business process owners and Year 2000 program staff to identify
core business processes and supporting mission-critical
systems for each business area."
The Navy Plan is even more succinct: In its "continuity of operations
plans (COOP) AFLOAT Template, it states for Mission
Critical Function/Process Description: "Ships Navigation." In its
Appendix C - Continuity of Operations Plans (Ashore) Base
Operations Support Sustainment, it lists under "Mission Area, Function
or Process Description": "The COOP defines the mission
area, function or process that the COOP is designed to protect."
Global 2000 seems to have a confused vision of Contingency Planning as
it defines two types of Contingency Plans:
"1) Remediation Contingency Plans: actions an organization may take in
the even that its Year 2000 remediation efforts can not be
completed as planned, e.g. to switch to an alternative software or
service provider if the organization's current provider(s) is
determined not to be willing to, or capable of, upgrading their
offering to be compliant within a satisfactory timeframe, cost or
quality."
"2) Business Resumption Contingency Plans - actions to be taken to
ensure the continuation of business in those situations where
disruptions may occur in spite of apparently successful efforts prior
to the Year 2000."
Global 2000 Contingency Plan type 1 assumes that all the plan has to
do is get the software to work and all will be fine. Its type 2
plan is more a Disaster Recovery Plan (what to do post undesirable
event with the resources at hand) than a Contingency plan
(developing special resources in case of and prior to the undesirable
event happening).
The Navy plan gives - agreed for a narrow set of activities of the
Navy (afloat functions) and only as an example a very limited
mission: "ship navigation." But we are to understand that the overall
mission of the Navy is nothing more than an aggregate of many
similar narrow and specific missions.
The GAO Contingency Plan assumes that "core business processes and
mission-critical" systems are a given and that Contingency
planners should start from there to develop their plans.
"Mission accomplished" is a well-recognized phrase in military lingo.
It invokes a commando type action with a simple objective and
signals that this objective has been attained. "Mission" is easy to
define in military terms.
Similarly it can be defined with reasonable ease for other government
agencies: the NIH (National Institutes of Health) mission, I
would say, is to research medical problems in order to find solutions
for them and improve the health of citizens. The mission of the
HUD (Housing and Urban Development) is to provide low cost housing for
the poor. The mission of the Navy is to protect the
country from the sea and in naval battles.
How these clearly defined missions will be accomplished is the subject
of political decisions: these agencies have a budget allowing
them to carry their mission within a clearly defined mode of
operation.
On the other hand, in the private sector, corporations have been
agonizing for years on how to define their missions. It is because
their choices are so numerous. Black and Decker decided after years of
struggling in money-losing lines of business to go back to its
former mission of providing small electric hand tools. But there was a
time when diversifying was the way to go and Black and
Decker thought it could be a good idea to manufacture all kinds of
electric appliances to capitalize on its expertise in electric
machinery.
In the public sector missions are fixed, narrow, mandated by law and
supported by the law. In the private sector - including
corporations but also some non-profits - the missions are much more
flexible, much more widely defined. The law does not mandate
them. There is no necessity to stick to yesterday mission. The law
does not protect them. They are defined on the basis of
customers' needs. They need to be kept only as long as customers will
support them. Indeed, if corporations have missions which
are not supported by customers they will shrivel up and die (the
"buggy whip manufacturers" syndrome).
Missions and "core-business functions" (the essential functions to
carry out these missions) are not fixed. They may artificially - and
for the sake of convenience - be considered fixed only for a short
period of time for a computer-consulting project when the rest of
the world is not expected to evolve too drastically and economic
conditions are expected to remain stable for the duration. But with
Y2K, the conditions will not be stable, nor normal. A business mission
and its business functions cannot be considered as given.
Contingency Planning must assume that the event one plans for will be
excessively disruptive. The proper manner to acknowledge
and translate a good understanding of this disruption is precisely to
redefine the mission and the business functions as not fixed. That
it is not going to be "business as usual."
On the contrary, top management will have to concentrate on how to
redefine this mission and the functions, which will help, carry
out the new mission. The computer tool will have to follow and adapt
to the new premises. It is only a tool and not an over-riding
business objective.
The field of management is curiously filled with fads and emotional
reasons why a specific theory of how to conduct a business is
adopted. There has been the "One minute manager", "the Leadership
period", and the "Change Management period." The reality is
that management, the conduct of human intellect and will applied to
reach economic objectives is a very difficult proposition. It is
fraught with desperate attempts to reach for the "silver bullet" which
will make it all easy.
Management has had a hard time competing with the recent intellectual
authority of the computer crowd, the geeks. Whatever the
geeks said about business had to be accepted. But now management has
to shake off its timidity, take back its authority and begin
developing Contingency Plans that are compatible with the wide array
of realities facing private sector organizations. Top
management has to realize that it needs to rely on the flexibility of
private sector organizations' definition of its missions. It is
actually
high time to be quite innovative in utilizing this flexibility.
Otherwise the rigidity of public sector Contingency Plans will choke
corporations to death during Y2K.
-------
(c) 1999 Jean-Francois Orsini
This article is published as part of Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather
Report and may be reproduced under the same terms and
conditions. All other rights reserved to the author.
---------------------------
Jean-Francois Orsini has had 25 years of business experience in
different areas of the discipline of business, providing for breadth
and depth. In finance, he has been a
stockbroker but also taught Modern Investment Theories at George Mason
University. He has started several businesses but also taught
Management at the University
of Maryland and wrote a textbook of management. He has sourced French
computer engineers and is the author of 3 patents. He is bringing
these different skills to an
overarching expertise in his consulting work in Strategic Planning. He
received a Ph.D. in Strategic Planning from the Wharton School, as
well as an MBA in Finance.
He has also a French MBA in accounting.
E-mail: jforsini@radix.net
Web page: ewtn.com
-- Y2K Contest --
The first DC Y2K Weather Report Contest begins immediately!
Complete this sentence.
You know you're in Y2K trouble when ...
...InfoMagic comes to your door looking for some food.
...you see the president of the local utility buying generators at
Home Depot.
...Dan Rather is interviewing Ko-Skin-em; Kosky is handing out the "no
problem" party line but you notice sacks of rice, two
AK-47's, and a kerosene heater in the background.
Rules:
1. Email submissions to Y2KCONTEST@hotmail.com
2. Include a mailing address if you want the valuable prize.
3. Submissions become the property of the DC Y2K Weather Reports.
4. An impartial panel of judges will review the submissions. Decisions
of the judges are final. Complaints will be ignored.
5. The contest closes February 30, 1999 (or whatever the last day of
February is.)
6. A whole bunch of people associated with the DC Y2K Weather Reports
are not eligable for the prize.
7. In case of duplicate entries, the first datetime stamp will win (if
we can figure out which date is less.)
8. Anyone can enter, doomer and pollys are welcome.
The prize is a listing in the DC Y2K Weather Report and a stainless
steel multi-purpose knife. While a knock-off, this one works
well, has a bunch of gizmos on it, half of which I can't identify but
I believe one is the fabled tool for taking a stone out of horse's
hoof.
We'll be running a contest once a month or as long as the judges stay
interested.
I'm looking for ideas for additional contests and volunteers to set up
collection points for the entries and do the judging.
Future contests may include:
200 word essay - How are you preparing?
200 word essay - How did you convince your friends?
Best Y2K T-Shirt saying
Name your Y2K dog.
What if paul milne and brad sherman had to room together at the Y2K
Success! Shelter?
If you had $500 what Y2K supplies would you buy?
Y2K bumper sticker.
Y2K snigglets
What do you call it when XXXX (famous person) discovers Y2K?
Obit -- Bill McKee --
C.s.y2k'er William McKee died on February 2, 1999. I reviewed some of
his postings using www.dejanews.com, run a powersearch
on mckee and comp.software.year-2000 for an understanding of who Bill
was. His own words say more about him than I am able
to.
Bill was a father and husband and concerned about the consequences of
Y2K to his family, friends, and neighbors.
-- CCCC --
Times up people. From Y2K Cynic's report from the store floor to
Andy's thoughts on time to Jean-Francois on contingencies, the
message is clear. Notice how little time we have left to plan and
implement our plans.
For corporations and people, it is important to remain flexible.
I have three plans.
Plan-A is essentially business as usual, life in the big city but with
some nominal precautions. The flashlight that runs for months, the
120 rounds in the office safe, the month's worth of canned goods, a
few dozen logs, enough to keep from freezing.
Plan-B is the exurbs. A borrowed $700 contractor's generator, two
cords of wood, 3 months of food and other supplies. More
remote and more supplies. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Plan-C is DragonRanch, Masada, a hundred acres in the beautiful
Virginia countryside, surrounded by orchards and dairy farms and
owned by a survivalist nut-case former COBOL programmer.
If Y2K is just a "Bradley Sherman", I'll stay in the city, watch the
problems on the Trinitron, no big deal.
If Y2K is an Edwards 4+, I'll hide in the Exurbs and pull in the
welcome mat.
If Y2K goes milne/Infomagic, I'll toss everyone into the station wagon
and head west to DragonRanch, live in a plywood shed until
things quiet down. If they don't, life is an adventure, I'll get up
each morning and we'll rebuild the world.
Considering the misery that most of the world lives in, a 12x30 T-111
shed in the Shennandoah Valley is a palace.
This isn't about panic. This is about facing reality, knowing the
consequences, and being ready for what ever comes.
Being prepared if "Something Wicked, This Way Comes."
There is no doubt that the remediation has failed. Senator Bennet and
even Ko-Skin-em himself is advising preparations somewhere
between my Plan-A and Plan-B.
Something unlike anything we have ever seen before is about to happen.
cory hamasaki
WRP -- Members Only --
We're working on the next book, sanitation issues post Y2K. In
wartime, disease, infection, sickness kills more soldiers than guns or
bombs.
Please check the members webpage from time to time,
kiyoinc.com
We're also planning a few members only surprises. Nothing big, just a
couple items to help out.
Ad -- Jim Abel --
Checkout glitchproof.com
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Fine print -- publishing information --
As seen in
USENET:comp.software.year-2000
elmbronze.demon.co.uk
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gonow.to
ocweb.com
vistech.net
kiyoinc.com
Don't forget, the Y2K chat-line:
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Please fax or email copies of this to your geek pals, especially those
idiots who keep sending you lightbulb, blonde, or Bill Gates
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