Hi,

I am one of those who particularly liked Ed's prudent, practical, thorough and insightful submissions to this forum. I also enjoyed his particularly approachable information (mostly essays) on his web site. When he decided to devote his energies to other pursuits (and I fully support his decisions and the reasons which caused him to do so), I felt a bit like the miners after a cave in who lost the guy with the one single remaining working lamp and the map back to the surface.

Anyway, Ed is elsewhere and we have all adjusted. Is there quality information out there on the problem - yes. Is there prudent and practical information on how to prepare - yes. Sometimes you have to turn over rocks and discard some worms, but the information is there. What I miss is the overall wisdom and insight that his 35 years of experience have given him and he provided to us.

Other comments from you GI's out there ?

TTY

NOTE: Ed, if your read this, please consider kicking in the odd periodic comment to us GI's. It sure would be nice to read your thoughts and gain your insight again (I know you showed up a week or so ago so you must be lurking on the list periodically). From the recent posting to the net on "corporate/govt. progress to date", I think we must finally be reaching the end of the lull and things will begin to heat up. Great time for injections of wisdom.

-- Jim Standen (jstanden@ucalgary.ca), June 25, 1999

Answers

Ed still checks in, now and then. And the Y2K world continues to turn. (And spin).

Diane

See thread...

Ed Yourdon sighting in the press...

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id= 000z1r

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), June 25, 1999.

Jim,

Yes, I'm still here, and still checking the forum on a daily basis. But my email traffic has dropped from 300 messages to approx 30 per day, and the phone calls from brain-dead reporters have dropped to zero. I've gotten more stuff accomplished in the past few weeks than in the past 12 months. And this has been important for me, as there were lots of minor Y2K prep things (like a manual lawn mower) that I had been postponing, month after month, on the theory that I could get to it "sometime next summer." Well, summer has arrived, and I can't afford to put things off any longer.

I'm hoping that I'll be completely caught up (or as completely as one can realistically hope to be) in another month or two; and I think that for most of the country, it will be fairly quiet in terms of Y2K -- unless there turn out to be some serious Joanne-effect problems on July 1, or some serious GPS problems on Aug 22. There are lots of other significant deadlines on June 30th (e.g., nuclear power plants are supposed to report their status to the NRC, banks are supposed to be completely finished, Wall Street firms are supposed to send their contingency plans to the SEC, etc.); but I think the only public reports we'll see are things like "substantially complete," or "compliant with minor issues," or "making excellent progress, supremely confident everything is under control." We might see one or two token examples of punishment, such as the Fed deciding to close down the Third National Bank of Hog Jowls, Arkansas but I doubt that we'll see any acknowledgment by public officials of serious problems....

I just saw the thread indicating the Dick Mills has also dropped off the radar screen, as has Victor Porlier, Jim Lord, and several others. I think we all share a common feeling: we've said just about everything we know how to say for now, and there's not much point in repeating ourselves until something begins to happen. I suspect that will start in the fall -- perhaps as early as Labor Day, but almost certainly by October 1, because a number of policy decisions (e.g., no-fly zones, investor decisions to liquidate their portfolio, etc.) will have to be made well in advance of the Dec 31st deadline.

Bottom line: I'll keep lurking daily, but will be working 16 hours a day on my own stuff for the rest of the summer. Meanwhile, best of luck with your Y2K plans, whatever they may be...

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (taking_a_break@newmexico.usa), June 25, 1999.

I think Ed is still doing "paid" work in the y2k field. Anyway, a programmer buddy sent me this y2k column that Ed wrote, I guess its' a e-zine or listserv newsletter or something. If his description of Italy is correct, i don't think I wanna be in Rome on New Years Eve.

Grunt (aka one of those programmers, down in the trenches, that you guys are always talking about)

ETERNAL ROME

Question: on 1 January 2000, what could possibly be more significant than Y2000 in a major urban center like Rome?

Answer: the arrival of 25 million pilgrims, anxious to celebrate the Jubilee, a religious festival scheduled once or twice a century by the Catholic Church. I had heard about this when I last visited Rome in October 1997, but when I returned to the Eternal City again last week, I could tell they were really serious: the traffic jams were so bad that it took twice as long as usual to get to the center of the city, because all of the highways from the airport are being widened in anticipation of the crowds.

The official estimate of the number of expected visitors is 20-25 million, but some of the residents that I met tell me that the unofficial estimate is closer to 40 million. The population of Rome is approximately 3 million, so that works out to roughly 7-14 tourists for every citizen; even without Y2000, it's hard to imagine how the infrastructure of utilities, healthcare, food distribution, and other essential services will survive. Throw in a few Y2000 disruptions for good measure (e.g., something along the lines of the 4 million gallons of raw sewage that spewed into a park in Southern California last week during a Y2000 test), and it could turn into a disaster of mind-boggling proportions.

But the Italians, by and large, don't seem particularly worried about any of this. Indeed, the vast majority of them seem utterly oblivious about Y2000. While I was in Rome, I presented a Y2000 contingency planning seminar to a small group of IT professionals from the large banks, telecommunication companies, and the airport authority, along with some government representatives from Chile, and some Y2000 planners from a Rome-based United Nations food distribution program. All of them knowledgeable, professional, concerned, and hard at work on their contingency plans -- but they seemed strangely out of place in the country that has shown such little overall concern for Y2000. While the US appointed a Y2000 czar in February 1998, Italy didn't create such a post until January 1999; and initially, the national Y2000 commission had no phone and no office. Italy created a national Y2000 Web site at http://www.comitatoanno2000.it/ -- but as of March 1999, it consisted of only one page, which said, "Under Construction." A 14 January *Reuters* story quoted Cabinet undersecretary Franco Bassanini as saying "I'm afraid we're starting this a little late." And in mid-May 1999, the *London Times* http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/05/14/ timfgneur01003.html?999 quoted Romano Oneda, the education expert on Italy's Year 2000 Committee, as saying, "Italy is going to crash, and we are going to be crucified. We are supposed to make things go so smoothly that nobody would realise there was ever a problem. Instead we will be the scapegoats. We have only consultative powers, and no one is listening to us."

Is there a lesson to be learned from all of this? Perhaps the most important observations came during a discussion of "proactive" contingency planning versus "reactive" planning in my Y2000 seminar. I had suggested that the proactive approach - i.e., eliminating Y2000 risks before they even occur, by doing such things as replacing non-compliant vendors -- was preferable, and that a reactive approach could degenerate into frantic "fire-fighting." But one of the seminar delegates, who works for a government agency, pointed out that the bureaucracy, complacency, denial, and long-term inertia of most Italian organizations virtually rules out the possibility of implementing a proactive approach. "We have so little time left now," he said. "And the request to make a proactive Y2K contingency planning decision, and to spend the money that would be required, has to go up the organizational chain of command to a very high level. Any manager in the chain of command who doesn't like the idea can kill it simply by sitting on it for a few months." Consequently, he said, his organization was focusing entirely on a reactive, fix-on-failure approach to Y2000 problems, because it could be organized without attracting the attention of senior management.

This may seem like a cynical observation - but cynicism seems to pervade many discussions about Y2000 these days. During the final question-answer discussion session of my seminar, the last comment was from a seminar attendee who asked if I could explain why there is such an Anglo-Saxon obsession about Y2000. After all, he said, it appeared that the only countries making a big fuss about Y2000 were America, England, Canada, and Australia; the rest of Europe seemed much calmer, and the rest of the world seemed largely unconcerned. What is it about the Anglo-Saxon culture, the seminar attendee wanted to know, that makes them so frenzied about Y2000? I had no answer to his question.

As I left for the airport on Saturday morning, the taxi drove me past the Egyptian obelisk in the Piazza del Poppolo, down the Via del Corso, past an almost endless display of statues and ruins and churches. I couldn't help reminding myself that this is the city that ruled much of the civilized world for a thousand years, the city that battled barbarians at its gates, and the city that survived mad emperors, corrupt Popes, the Bubonic Plague, and the Dark Ages, as well as fire, famine, flood, pestilence, and two World Wars. If Rome could survive all of this, I can understand why its citizens are confident they can survive Y2000. And if Rome can, so can we all. Rome is the eternal city; perhaps the lesson that it gives us is that we'll all muddle through Y2000, one way or the other.

Ciao!

Ed

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

-- Grunt Programmer (inthetrenches@y2kproject.com), June 25, 1999.

Thanks, Ed, for everything. Gad, manual lawn mowers - spent too many hours in my youth mowing an acre and a half with one of those beasties. I've made sure that I now have minimal lawn to deal with.

We're almost at end of June 1999, friends, and Y2K is now ballistic. Significant course corrections are most unlikely. It will be what it will be, and all we can do now is get ready as best we can.

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), June 25, 1999.