Koskinen Says Effects Of Y2K Difficult To Predict (USIA)greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread |
Koskinen Says Effects Of Y2K Difficult To Predict (USIA)I recently joined a USIA (United States Information Agency) Y2K alert e-mail list. This was just sent out. Not really linked to anything, yet.
Do, read between-the-lines.
Diane
KOSKINEN LAUDS U.S. Y2K EFFORT
(Y2K czar speaks in Washington) (590)
By Paul Malamud
USIA Staff Writer
Washington -- John Koskinen, the head of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, says the U.S. government has made "tremendous progress" readying its computers for the Year 2000 challenge.
Speaking at a National Newspaper Association gathering March 19, Koskinen promised that by the end of March over 90 percent of mission-critical systems run by the U.S. government will be year-2000-compliant.
However, he added: "We're still worried about everybody else," including state and local governments, corporations -- especially smaller ones -- and developing nations in particular.
In this age of global telecommunications and computer links "no person and no country is an island unto itself," Koskinen warned. The problem, he emphasized, is now "a management issue, not a technical issue," and the solution lies in the will to deal with it.
It is difficult to predict with accuracy how disruptive Y2K will become, Koskinen said. "There is no way to know how much more work (to fix the problem) will be done and by whom" between now and January 2000.
However, while lauding the federal government's efforts to fix its own computers, Koskinen worried whether the states, which run "over 150 major programs" in conjunction with the federal government, will have their houses in order by next January.
Come year 2000, Koskinen emphasized, "We cannot afford to have a single state unable to run a federal program" such as unemployment insurance or job training, which are administered on the state level.
The U.S. government, Koskinen explained, has formed working groups with crucial economic sectors, such as power generation and telecommunications, using trade associations as "umbrella organizations" to "increase the level of awareness and activity" in the private and quasi-private sector.
Thanks to "massive amounts of testing" of computer systems for the Y2K bug, Koskinen said, as of now "there is no evidence that we are going to have major failures" in these crucial areas of infrastructure in the United States. "Banking," he added, "is ahead of virtually all the other industries."
However, he admitted, "It's hard for" the U.S. government "to get information about what's going on locally" in state governments and smaller jurisdictions, and in "small and medium-size organizations" of all kinds.
Koskinen said no organization dependent on computers, computer networks or embedded chip processes should take the approach, "We'll wait to see what breaks and then fix it."
"The risk," he noted, "is that you may find" at that point "that you're at the end of a very long line" to get repairs or new equipment, which could be backlogged until May or June 2000.
Koskinen said the U.S. government hopes to participate in a "community conversations" initiative this summer with Americans throughout the nation to present realistic information and avoid misjudgments such as gasoline hoarding or massive, unnecessary withdrawals of cash from banks.
Internationally, Koskinen said, "virtually every country's failure will have some impact on us," though he praised recent improved international coordination and information-sharing on the Y2K issue, often undertaken on a regional basis. "There has been (useful) sector work done internationally," he added, especially in banking and telecommunications.
Failure to deal with the Y2K bug now, he warned, may mean some nations "may not have power" for awhile, and some may have "transportation difficulties."
While "virtually all" developed countries "seem to be making reasonable progress" in Y2K remediation, Koskinen said, the worst thing for any nation at any stage of development is "doing nothing" to help its people shore up critical computer operations in advance of the millennium bug.
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-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), March 22, 1999