...let's check out the DATE of the "facts" he offers for the State of TEXAS.

NOTE the whole site contains NO UPDATES OF THE FACTS. Great trick. Almost as good as North's. Just keep putting in the FEAR QUESTIONS and "MOVING ON".

And again: note the "non-Kapp-Compliant" TWO YY FORM. I stopped using that in 1996 and here is "30 YEAR EXPERT" Heller using it today on his never updated web site.

http://www.koyote.com/users/stheller/y2k71121.htm


A report on the State of Texas and the Year 2000 problem by Steve Heller Susan and I went to a meeting of the Dallas-Fort Worth Data Administration Management Association Year 2000 users group on 11/21/97. The speaker was Shannon Porterfield, the statewide Y2K project director for the Department of Information Resources (DIR) of the State of Texas. The Y2K office was set up in May of this year. Here are some highlights of her presentation.


Scope of the problem They hired IBM to do an assessment of the state of the information systems in 133 state agencies, which did not include state universities. After nine weeks of work, IBM reported that it would cost them somewhere in excess of $200,000,000 to fix the problems. Nine of the agencies accounted for 85% of the costs.

Their best guess is that the universities probably account for at least as much expense as the agencies, which would bring the total to over $400,000,000.

The legislature has appropriated $110,000,000 to fix the problem; the rest of the expenditure is supposed to come from the agencies' current budgets.

Obstacles to a solution They are having serious problems with loss of personnel. Some programmers are retiring, and some are leaving for private industry so as to make much higher salaries. However, equally important is the loss of the subject matter experts, who know what these systems are supposed to do.

In addition, other projects are still competing for money and people with Y2K projects.

Progress so far They have set up a plan to get reports from the agencies on their progress. The frequency of reporting is based on the priority of the agency involved, and varies from monthly to quarterly. No reports have come in yet.

They have set up a bonus plan to retain "mission-critical" people. Such people can be paid $5000 bonuses for both 1998 and 1999 ... in May of 2000. For some reason, this plan doesn't seem to be working very well. The main takers are:

People who were going to retire in a couple of years and therefore don't want to change jobs. People who prefer state employment to private-sector employment. They had a meeting with representatives of the state regulatory agencies during the week of the 17th. The Department of Insurance has sent out a survey to find out how the insurance companies are doing. The Public Utility Commission representative thought this was a very good idea and was planning to suggest this to his management committee. At that comment, the DIR's staff lawyers fell back in their chairs in amazement.

Embedded systems The assessment by IBM didn't include embedded systems, and the legislature hasn't provided any money or guidance on this issue.

However, the DIR is definitely at the awareness stage with this issue. Ms. Porterfield described the possible legal consequences of embedded systems failures as "staggering". They have tried to set up a task force to address this issue, but haven't been able to get anything going.

Aside from the usual problems such as pipelines, the telephone network, and the like, there are two state universities that run their own nuclear power plants; so far, the DIR hasn't been able to get in touch with the people who are responsible for these plants.

Prognosis Some agencies don't appear to have done anything at all. In addition, some of them aren't taking this very seriously; for example, the Department of State objected to being put on the "priority" list.

With this sort of attitude, it did not come as a surprise when Ms. Porterfield told us that not all the agencies are going to be finished on time.

Ms. Porterfield also mentioned the fact that without power or telephones, it's all over. And what about those nuclear power plants?

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), June 23, 2000

Answers

The Great State of Texas' Y2k effort lead by Shannon and many others was discussed on TB I in depth by a member of the Y2k Team from TxDIR.
Texas FINISHED LONG BEFORE SCHEDULED, UNDER BUDGET.
When they found that results from different auditors on sets of Codes returned different results and were highly questionable to begin with, they simply "did it themselves" (much against all the schreeching from the "30+ years Experts who were demanding the "IV&V" they were SELLING THEMSELVES).



-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), June 23, 2000.