Doomer prediction throughout 1997 and 1998:

"The commitment to have all mission-critical systems remediated by Dec. 31, 1998 and to provide an entire year for testing will be missed. Many countries and enterprises will have less than six months for testing, which will prove inadequate.

Still many more will opt to fix-on-failure which will be disastrous. Of the latter group, most large enterprises (including municipalities) will "go out of business" (maybe not literally, but functionally).

You cannot remediate and test in three days what took comparable enterprises months or years (see Social Security Administration and Montgomery County for cases)."

.... The first part of this prediction has come true. Not, "will come true" but "has come true".

.... Now we await the second part.

Compared to the blather about 1999 critical dates, this is the real deal. Hundreds of media articles testify carelessly to it because they don't realize that the slipped dates for remediation and testing mean anything ("they still have six months").

No, they don't. The "year of testing" was right-on for the huge, enterprise-level systems that run the world and EVEN MORE RIGHT ON given the inter-systems, inter-industry, inter-country and, running like a thread through it all, inter-protocol demands of getting the entire world system's fixes debugged .... in time.

Time is up. It's too late to do it. That is a simple exigency of the nature of software. This isn't hyperbole on my part nor pessimism, just the reality of what "big-time" IT is all about.

I said on another thread today that we are now going off the cliff. But, we don't yet know whether the drop is 10 feet (worldwide broken ankle), 50 feet (broken back) or 200 feet (culture death).

This dog is praying for 10 feet, expecting 50 feet and fearing 200 feet. The probability of the latter is small, but anyone who knows IT knows how weird broken systems can be. Very, very, very weird.

The sorry status of schedule delays at this point is worse than I expected last year and I expected it to be bad last year. Against the flow of authentic good news, which I welcome like any human being with small children, is the deadly "misdirection" of most of the press releases (you in IT know what I mean as you read them between the lines looking/hoping for good "hard, tech" news and not finding it) and the eerie, total silence of the rest.

Buckle up, boys and girls. We're going off the cliff TOGETHER and the cliff edge is in plain sight.

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), July 09, 1999

Answers

Well said. However, given the density of inter-relationships and the knowledge that various duplicate supports exist, it is impossible to know the drop ahead. No doubt its coming, but is it a cliff or a speed bump. Probably somewhere in between.

-- RD-> H (drherr@erols.com), July 09, 1999.

I doubt if this will be a bump in the road worldwide. Given the status here and considering that almost all other countries are further behind, I think it will be much worse elsewhere. The problem, as Big Dog says, is that the problem here will be worse than hoped for as recently as last year.

Remember when the term Mission Critical was first broached as viable? At the time it was scoffed at and now it seems to be universally accepted. How many systems will remain untouched or partially remediated?

Remember when "Compliant" was defined and accepted as a standard? Now we have "Ready" which has no standard.

It is not just the remediation and the dates that are slipping. In July of 1999 we are seeing the errosion of responsibility.

Perhaps the only thing that is better this year than last is the ability of the government and industry to shape the media coverage to present a front that says all is under control.

The combination of these is a recipe for disaster.

-- Mike Lang (webflier@erols.com), July 09, 1999.

I'm a system analyst with a large international co. Got called into the project manager's office last week. The home office haas finally decided to address the problem as far a company business goes (admin stuff, paychecks, benifits, etc) As I have been working this problem in operations with our customer since Dec 1997, he wanted my input. I sat down with him and his assistant and we never got past paychecks. All pay info is submitted electronically to the home office, where they cut the checks and I think they are Fed-Exed back to us (copies--everybody required to have direct deposit) Interesting discussion. If we can't electronically transmit, can we FAX? No, no electricity. Boiled down to manually (yes, we actually have two manual typewriters) typing checks on site. Project Manager said,"What good will that do. If ther's no electricity You can't take the check to the bank and get it cashed." Got the home office's solution today. Payroll is normally processed on Mon. (our week ends on Sun) At the roll-over home office will process pay on Thurs. They can 'play'with the pay system over the weekend and if there are problems they have a week to fix it. And that's just the pay system. God help us all.

-- DuffyO (duffyo@mailcity.com), July 09, 1999.

Mike -- Absolutely spot on. Mission critical was once a subject of debate since it was well-recognized that so-called non-mission critical systems could also bring down computing entities if left unremediated. Yes, strict compliance was the goal. Why? Because computers can't just "kinda get it right". "Readiness" is certainly, in part, a legal construct meant to protect even the compliant, but it undoubtedly lowers the technical bar with respect to remediation, especially for SMEs. Erosion of responsibility is precisely the issue.

Duffy -- Let's assume electricity stays on as everyone "promises" it will. The disaster here is that, on July 9, 1999, innumerable government and business entities worldwide are just now reaching so-called Y2K awareness and, even at that, only with respect to scattered information components.

Sorry to bore the troops, but Y2K has exposed the utter haphazardness of the way we inventory and manage our systems. Most entities do not understand the way their own business works from a systems point of view (Duffy, again). It is no wonder that they either believe an analysis of business risk is unneeded or that they have already performed such an analysis in the course of their "ordinary" activities.

There are exceptions: tens of thousands of them. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of thousands of entities who must be remediated in time. FOF over three days ain't gonna cut it for them. Or us.

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), July 09, 1999.

In spite of what I would like to believe, painful experience with trying to manage very small software development projects leads me to expect scenarios indicated by the following quotes: 1. Nature Cannot be Fooled The renown software management statistician Capers Jones Software Productivity Research firm says that in 1995 over 70% of all software development projects failed outright or were late or under-featured when they did come out  an on-time, on-spec success rate of less than 30%. So, normal, minuscule (in comparison to the whole) projects fail 2 out of 3 times. Not much help there, either. History is telling us, at a very minimum, not to be overconfident...
Link

=============================== 2. The Mythical Man Month - Frederick Brooks "Brooks Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." "More programming projects have gone awry for the lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." and finally... "All repairs tend to destroy structure, to increase the entropy and disorder of a system. Even the most skillful program maintenance only delays the program's subsidence into unfixable chaos, from which there has to be a ground-up redesign." ===================================== Prep - don't panic. Visit your local Walmart this weekend.

-- Canary (balzerg@ix.netcom.com), July 09, 1999.

Excellent summary!

Bob, Ph.D. Nuclear Engineering

-- bob (janebob99@aol.com), July 09, 1999.

I'm reminded of the pregnancy analogy. It takes 1 woman 9 months to produce a baby. But, 9 women can't produce a baby in 1 month. We're getting low on time.

-- nine (nine_fingers@hotmail.com), July 09, 1999.

Please read "Hamasaki: why Y2K won't be fixed in two to three hours"

It's about ten threads below.

-- George (jvilches@sminter.com.ar), July 10, 1999.

The distinction between mission-critical and non-critical is software triage.

-- Lane Core Jr. (elcore@sgi.net), July 10, 1999.

Big Dog, If we are going over the cliff with Y2K, then why dosent more people beat the heard and scale down the cliff and build a way of life for your family. I know you are and so are we.

If Y2k is a drop off of 10 feet, 50 feet, or 200 feet..... I will better prepared than someone not doing anything.

-- bulldog (sniffin@around.com), July 10, 1999.

BigDog,

Was up early today and turned on Channel 4.

Y2K Zar, john K. was on and I olny just caught the end of it. The Question was to the effect of ...

So you feel the media has the ability to report what you want it to so that there are not bank Runs?

His answer was less than adequeate. "Well of course I want people to feel comfortable with where there money is."

And the rest went unanswered.

Pisses you off, doesn't it?

Father

..............May the outcome be Merciful.

-- Thomas G. Hale (hale.tg@att.net), July 11, 1999.