November 29, 1999

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Y2K:
Not Just Another New Year's Eve...
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Related links:

Y2K Liability Year 2000 Resource Center

And from our sister publications:

InternetWeek Enterprises Vulnerable To Y2K Hacks Tele.com Y2K: Pockets of Fear And Pocketbook Fears

Still, Visa's McCarthy says it hasn't been difficult to find staff willing to sacrifice a holiday weekend with family and friends to see their Y2K remediation efforts through. "There's a general excitement about being a part of this," McCarthy says. He attributes it in part to the all-day, every-day culture at Visa. "Morale is up for the project," he adds.

As data collection systems administrator, Sassan Karai, a senior system analyst for Siemens Energy and Automation, an Alpharetta, Ga., manufacturer of energy distribution-related equipment such as control panels and circuit breakers, is required to be on- site from 9 p.m. Dec. 31 until 6 a.m. Jan. 1 to ensure that transactions taking place during that time are processed without incident. Karai says it's part of the job--but it's also a once-in-a-lifetime event.

"It's not going to be too pleasant for people to be away from their families that night, but there's a general understanding of the importance of being there," Karai says. Bonus pay for being on-site and overtime pay for being on-call will help him and his colleagues "bite the bullet," he says.

Bill Charest, second VP of production and technical services for Lincoln Life of Connecticut, a life-insurance company in Hartford, Conn. and a division of Lincoln Financial Group Inc., says morale is high for meeting Y2K head-on. "The staff is looking forward to the weekend as a culmination of many years of work and is anxious to put Y2K behind them." Charest himself will pull the overnight shift (3 p.m. to 8 a.m.) on both Dec. 31 and Jan. 1. While Charest and his staff are free to go home between shifts, 20 to 30 staff members must be on-site at all times throughout the weekend. Lincoln personnel looking to get the full effect of changeover weekend will have the option of napping between shifts on beds set up in a room normally reserved for nursing mothers.

What worries CIOs and IT managers most about millennium weekend? According to the InformationWeek survey, technology managers are most concerned with aspects of their systems over which they have little or no control, such as the telecommunications and power infrastructures, as well as transportation and logistics.

For example, Bob Lewis, VP of IT for Unified Foodservice Purchasing Co-op, the Louisville, Ky. central purchasing and order-replenishment facility for 22,000 KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut restaurants in the United States, is more concerned about transportation than he is about his company's internal systems. "I'm not 100% sure that 50,000 cases of lettuce will survive if they're stuck on a train somewhere," Lewis says.

Viking Freight Inc., a San Jose, Calif., transportation company servicing the western United States, plans to do its part to keep the trucks rolling by establishing a command center beginning Dec. 31 to monitor freight tracking and accounting systems. Viking will keep the command center functional until "we're confident everything out on the road has been moved," says project manager Dave Anderson.

The control room will be staffed in eight- or nine-hour shifts by up to five members of the company's IT staff. Viking's CIO plans to be right beside his team in the control room, taking several shifts of monitor-watching throughout the weekend, Anderson says. This central control room--actually a board room that will be set up with several monitors as well as a television for tracking weather and news--will provide Viking drivers on the road and staff at the company's 45 freight-service centers with a place to call if there's an emergency. It will also serve as the coordination point for Viking's staff to respond rapidly to any technology-related issues that arise during the weekend

 Despite the concern often expressed about supply-chain problems related to Y2K, most technology managers are confident their business partners will not affect their operations. The InformationWeek survey indicates that, overall, IT managers feel there's only a 7% chance that their company will suffer system or application failures and/or downtime as a result of Y2K-related failures at their business partners' sites. The smaller the company, however, the greater the likelihood.

There's no doubt that American businesses are taking Y2K seriously. A study conducted by U.S. Commerce Secretary William Daley and other administration officials estimates that from 1995 through 2001, U.S. businesses and government agencies will have spent about $100 billion to identify, test, and correct error-prone technologies. That's equal to about $365 for every American.

Prudential has been preparing for the Y2K weekend for a long time. "We've been doing Y2K work for four years," says Dec. Prudential had 95% of its code and applications converted and tested for year 2000 compliance in December 1998, she says.

Dec estimates that 60% of what "could be a year 2000 issue" will be discovered during New Year's weekend. By Jan. 10, 80% to 85% of all systems and applications will have been checked--while still being used under their normal business procedures. This includes applications Prudential uses with its business partners, Dec says. Because some applications, such as quarterly reports, run infrequently, Prudential's Y2K tracking work won't be completed until March 1. Nonetheless, in the end, "every line of code will be tracked," Dec asserts.

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Illustration by Chris Lensch
Photo of Lewis by Jim Callaway

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