Cebrowski stated this in June 1998. The premise still holds true. Sounds a lot like Greespan did back then...

R.

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GOVERNMENT NEWS

GCN June 15, 1998

Navy official: Date code failure rate must be nil

By Gregory Slabodkin GCN Staff

Even if 99 percent of the Navys systems are ready for 2000, the service likely will experience severe service hiccups, said Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, the Navys director of space, information warfare, command and control.

A failure rate of just 1 percent may be enough to significantly hamper Navy operations, Cebrowski said this month at the GCN Forum luncheon in Washington.

"Clearly, 1 percent is not satisfactory," he said.

Cebrowski said a similar failure rate at civilian agencies would result in 43,000 faulty medical prescriptions, 27,000 lost Medicare claims, $16 million unrecorded credit card transactions and 6 million pieces of lost mail.

The Navys Year 2000 Project Office, commanded by Rear Adm. Stephen Johnson, began with a clear objective but has had to readjust its plan of attack, Cebrowski said.

Never assume

"We did not have the confidence in what we were doing," he said. "We were assuming that each system owner through the acquisition process was looking at what he had to do to fix the year 2000 problem. But no enterprise operates that way. What we have to do is evaluate and test the enterprise holistically."

The holistic approach, Cebrowski said, created a quandary; the devil was in the details, such as in the interfaces between systems.

"Its really hard to devise a test plan for a whole ship," he said. "How do you develop a year 2000 test and evaluation plan for an aircraft carrier? How about an entire base?"

The Navy estimates that it will spend $479 million to fix its year 2000 problem, including converting Marine Corps systems code.

The service has 800 mission-critical systems. Of those, 18 have been replaced, eight have been shuttered, 184 are under renovation, 317 have been validated, 16 are being implemented and 257 have been fixed.

Cebrowski said the Navy has had to dip into its information technology modernization budget to pay for year 2000 work.

Cebrowski, principal adviser on computer systems to the chief of Naval operations, said the Navys IT investment budget increased 12 percent in the past three years. The Armys budget rose by 10 percent, and the Air Forces by 2 percent over the same period, he said.

DODs IT budget doubled between 1983 and 1998, but ci vilian agencies IT budgets jumped nearly 400 percent, Ce browski said. That indicates that Defense is not keeping pace with technological change, he said.

Falling behind

Nor is it possible for the military to keep pace with industrys 18-month development cycle for the latest innovations, he said.

"The technology refresh rate for Navy IT should be somewhere between three years and seven years," he said.

Cebrowski said leveraging new IT applications will help carry the Navy and other services into the next century. The DOD blueprint for 21st century warfare, in which IT plays a central role, is called Joint Vision 2010.

Cebrowski said he was encouraged by a decision made by DOD last month to designate the Atlantic Command as the executive agent for conducting joint warfighting experiments.

The Navy has conducted three of its own fleet battle experiments (FBEs) to explore new weapons systems, technologies and deployment doctrines.

FBE Alpha, in March 1997, demonstrated a LAN for surface fire support. FBE Bravo, in September, demonstrated the use of PCs, digital cameras and Global Positioning System receivers in sensor-to-shooter applications.

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), September 19, 1999

Answers

Sorry...link.

www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1998/june15/navy_official.htm

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), September 19, 1999.

Snip:

""Its really hard to devise a test plan for a whole ship," he said. "How do you develop a year 2000 test and evaluation plan for an aircraft carrier? How about an entire base?" "

Food for thought!!

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), September 19, 1999.