BrainStorm Conference Preview - Walking to New Orleans

The next Year 2000 conference I will reporting on for is the BrainStorm Conference in New Orleans from March 29 through the 31st. I spoke with William Ulrich, co-chairman of the conference, to get a preview for our readers of the areas of possible Y2K impact that will be covered at the conference.

First, there will be an industry-wide update on the current status of the telecommunications industry, the retail industry, and the power utilities. There will also be heavy emphasis on contingency planning with one workshop on supply chains and another on crisis management including how to set up a command and control center.

Desktop and PC compliance will be addressed in some of the sessions, as will telecommunications, independent validation and verification, and the new higher quality tools that are now available. End to end testing will also be covered. There are also workshops for state and local government issues with emphasis on contingency planning. Steven Hock is doing a workshop that will cover legal preparation and readiness.

Stephanie Moore of the Giga Group is doing a presentation that covers year 2000 readiness overseas. One of the main year 2000 concerns at this time is the interdependency of the world's economies and the effects the millennium bug will have in the third world. While predictions of what will happen cover the entire spectrum, the Giga presentation promises to show what several large, multi-national companies are doing to address the problems.

Gill Wagner, president of Orbtech, will give a workshop on eleventh hour strategies for small and midsize companies to get the most bang for their year 2000 buck using tools that will continue to serve the company into the next century.

William Ulrich told me that executives who are responsible for their company's Y2K readiness would benefit from this conference as will their in-house counsel and legal advisors. Others who would benefit include IT professionals who need help with testing, project managers who need information on contingency planning, and any other interested party who wants to know what is really happening in the year 2000 area.

While Ulrich thinks that many organizations have made progress in dealing with the Year 2000 problem, he does not believe that we are out of the woods by any means. There will be a variety of unplanned and unforeseen problems to deal with and he says now is the time to be diligent and put our noses to the grindstone.

To close out the conference, Ulrich will provide a workshop on re-aligning IT with business strategies for the future. The thrust of this workshop is to create a better way to align the business and IT requirements of an organization. After all, it would be a real waste of financial resources and time if we ignore all the effort we have put into this problem when we could use it as a springboard to become more competitive and efficient in the future.

Brainstorm Group has given our readers a discount on attending the conference -- details are at

http://www.year2000.com/conf/bsconf.html .

I hope you will make it to the conference and have a chance to say hello to me while you are there. (So you will know what I look like, you can find a photo of me at the end of my article at http://www.year2000.com/archive/huntress/NFhtinker.html). Angela Adair, who produces the year2000.com web site and writes the regular newsletter you receive from us, will be there as well. And if you find you can't attend, then I hope you will look forward to reading my coverage of some of the conference sessions that we will distribute to you over this list in the weeks following the conference.

See you in New Orleans! Jon Huntress jon@year2000.com

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Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), March 21, 1999

Answers

Parts of New Orleans are below sea level ... prone to hurricanes ... rely on electrical pumping stations to not drown ... nuclear plant ... New Orleans has unique risks.

-- Nola (wanther@make.it), March 21, 1999.