Paging Ed Yourdon! Y2K Symposium in NYC... were you there?

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Hi, Ed!

According to the list of speakers at Brainstorm Group, Inc's website, you were (to be) a speaker at the last symposium. Were you? You probably know that Gordon McDonald's impression of the information has been discussed here a few times. From his reports, it seems like the information the gov't is putting out is way off the mark (no!!! would they do that???)

Could you give us your take on the info you heard? If you didn't go, do you know or have you spoken to anyone who did? I know that you planned to quit making appearances, so maybe it was a relatively old speaker list, but we still would like to hear your opinion!

Thanks!

-- Arewyn (isitth@latealready.com), November 18, 1999

Answers

Arewyn, thought of this several days ago and requested Ed's input. I hope Ed will not mind me reposting his email response.

Thanks for your mail...

Okay, I've listened to the audio file ... and I'm not quite sure how to respond. I spent some time chatting with Gordon MacDonald, but I didn't sit through all of the sessions for all three days -- so perhaps he got a slightly different perspective than I did.

It's certainly true that most, if not all, of the speakers and panelists have a much more pessimistic view than the official government party line -- but that's been true all along, certainly in the case of the speakers at these Brainstorm Y2K conferences. Most of us are consultants, researchers, academics, or other forms of more- or-less independent people, so I don't think you could say that anyone speaking at the conference -- with the possible exception of Dr. Tom Barnett, of the Naval War College -- really represents the "official" position of the government on any of this stuff.

In any case, it seemed to me that in the audio file, Gordon was presenting the pessimistic outlook as if it had been stated by all of the speakers as a "factual assertion," whereas I believe that the speakers were still qualifying their remarks with caveats like "I think..." or "I believe ..." or "my interpretation of the situation is ..." In particular, Dr. Barnett emphasized several times in his talk that he was not trying to present us with THE outcome of Y2K, but rather a spectrum of POSSIBLE outcomes, in order to see whether they fall into any interesting patterns. His objective, as he told us, was to make sure that all of the military commanders have at least been exposed to as many of the possibilities as one could reasonably imagine happening, so that when Y2K does hit us, none of them will be able to say, "OmyGod, no one ever told me that THIS could happen, or that THAT could happen..."

The reason that the presentations all focused on crisis management and "outcomes" of Y2K is that at this point, with only a few weeks remaining, it's obviously too late to give a presentation about remediation and testing strategies. Indeed, it's even too late to talk about contingency plans for dealing with the so-called "known known" or "known unknown" problems; all of that work should have been finished by now. We are, quite literally, in the end-game now, and most of the speakers were trying to talk about what it's going to be like on the "other side" of Y2K, and how we'll manage to work our way out of it.

The comment about corporate acknowledgements of Y2K problems in their SEC statements was pretty accurate; that was mostly discussed in Steve Hock's presentation. He showed us several examples where corporations are now -- finally, after two or three years of obfuscation -- acknowledging that they have not get gotten any credible assurances of Y2K compliance from several hundred of their mission-critical suppliers. What's staggering to me about all of this is that Wall Street resolutely ignores this information, preferring to simply "trust" that everyone will be good little boys and girls and somehow get the remediation work done at the last minute.

Bottom line: there were not any really new "bombshells" and there was no presentation of a "smoking gun" form of "proof" that Y2K is going to be bad. It was more of a reconfirmation, on everyone's part, that the news still looks as gloomy today, in Oct/Nov 1999, as it did a year or two ago. As such, most of us considered the conference to be a farewell party, as we won't have a chance to get together again until after the Big Day.

Not sure if this answers your questions...

Ed

-- K Golden (kgolden@solar.stanford.edu), November 18, 1999.


K. Golden, thank you very much for your post. It's exactly what I expected (hoped?) Ed would say. Mr. McDonald's representation is very pessimistic, and Ed's perception is far more balanced.

Thanks again, and thanks, too, for not flaming me for posting a redundant question.

-- Arewyn (isitth@latealready.com), November 19, 1999.


;-D

Arewyn,

Also e-mailed Ed the URL of this thread. He's busy but his response was...

Diane,

Thanks for your mail...

Someone sent me an email about this a week or two ago, to which I responded. I'll track it down, expand on it a little bit, and post an answer. Bottom line: I think Gordon over-dramatized the tone and mood of the conference, though that may be a matter of opinion...

Ed



-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), November 19, 1999.


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