Interesting reading at Westergaards site (wbn.com) - Warren Bone looks at the government numbers again.

-- K Taylor (KTaylorOre@webtv.net), December 21, 1999

Answers

Link to article:

http://www.wbn.com/y2ktimebomb/Washington/Whitehouse/wb9951.htm

-- I'm Here, I'm There (I'm Everywhere@so.beware), December 21, 1999.

From Warren Bone's

Just the Facts: U.S. Federal Government Systems 72% Compliant, at Best

By Warren Bone
December 21, 1999:

"What I did not expect to happen was for there to be a big difference between Mr. Horn's report and the OMB report. I actually thought that someone would have made all the necessary adjustments to the data before making it available to even Mr. Horn. That way, his report and the OMB report would all be using the same numbers, even if they were adjusted to achieve 100%. Also, I did not expect DOD to add 114 systems only to have someone remove 261 all within the very same reporting period. All within three weeks? That kind of maneuvering will throw off anyone's projections."

-- This is (me@not.here), December 21, 1999.

Mr. Bone seems conveniently to ignore the claim in the final OMB report that 97% of all federal "non-critical" systems are also now compliant and that the remainder will be compliant by the end of December, thus rendering the distinction between "critical" and "non-critical" moot. This "rabbit out of the hat" claim caught many of us by complete surprise, since in the past the OMB, GAO, Koskinen, etc., have all routinely failed to comment on the progress being made on all those "non-critical" systems. I speculated in an earlier thread that many "non-critical" systems were "retired" or gutted, and that the rest of the "non-critical" systems were subjected to rather hasty remediation and probably less-than-full testing. But it's hard to know just what is going on; we aren't exactly getting full disclosure.

In the final OMB report, for instance, DoD claims 99% compliance of ALL systems, with roughly 2,000 systems classified as "critical" and 5,000 as "non-critical." Yet, as I recollect, when DoD did its original inventory for Y2K, it found that it had close to 30,000 systems. Even granting my supposition above (regarding large numbers of systems being retired or gutted), that apparently leaves a great many systems "missing in action," so to speak. In that respect, I'd agree with Mr. Bone's basic contention that there has been a fair amount of game playing by the feds. What a surprise.

The final question, of course, is whether or not the federal govt. is reasonably well prepared for Y2K. I don't know, and on my more cynical days I'm inclined to think that nobody else does, either. Regardless, we'll all find out soon enough. Even if all federal systems are "remediated and tested," I keep thinking back to the August GartnerGroup report that found 5-9% residual error rates in FULLY remediated and tested software in the private sector. (Error rates in remediated and partially tested code were running at 9-15%.) Assuming comparable error rates in federal systems, one might see some interesting developments.

-- Don Florence (dflorence@zianet.com), December 21, 1999.

In the final OMB report, for instance, DoD claims 99% compliance of ALL systems, with roughly 2,000 systems classified as "critical" and 5,000 as "non-critical." Yet, as I recollect, when DoD did its original inventory for Y2K, it found that it had close to 30,000 systems.

We've all seen the numbers game. Why would DoD or any of the other gov't agencies play the numbers game if they had the wherewithall to fix all the systems in the first place. Oh, I know. They concentrated on the Mission Critical 10% first, then when they finished with a whole, what... 3 weeks? to spare, they decided to go ahead and fix the other 90%. Hey... they are the DUDES! Don't we have some kind of special Purple Heart or something we can give these Super Geeks? (or should the award go to the PR guys who accounted for 80% of the effort and money?)

-- Linda (lwmb@psln.com), December 22, 1999.