Does anyone have the URL for the USA Today article of January 3 (or thereabouts) in which John Koskinen talks about why he has had such a small staff?

Someone told me about the quote. It sounds as if it has to be seen to be believed.

Has there been a URL on this article?

Many thanks!

Abc

-- abc (abc@ab.dc), January 05, 2000

Answers

I remember it from the interview, and almost fell out of my chair. Something to the effect that it was more fun (power?) running the world with 4 people than with thousands.

can u say ego?

-- (where@what.how), January 05, 2000.

What about the Y2K adoption? Why are all posts about that deleted? http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0025TL

-- Y2K Adoption? (concerned@foia.com), January 05, 2000.

-- Y2K Adoption? (concerned@foia.com), January 05, 2000.

Now, now, remeber that the poor man has a very small "staff."

-- anon (anon@anon.anon), January 05, 2000.

This might be the article you're talking about:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cth023.htm

01/03/00- Updated 12:11 PM ET

He 'snookered' the world into beating Y2K

By M.J. Zuckerman, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON -- Every great battle provides heroes.

John Koskinen, the federal government's Y2K czar, might seem an unlikely one, given his buttoned-down Brooks Brothers appearance, government-issue red neckties, gentle humor and pervasive sense of calm.

Yet he is widely credited with bringing the United States and perhaps the world through what has been called the greatest management challenge since World War II.

In a lengthy interview Sunday, as reports continued to pour in that the Y2K deadline was a stunning non-event, he dismissed suggestions that Y2K would be remembered historically as a global $500 billion hoax.

"We didn't get through this by luck," the 60-year-old chief coordinator of the White House's Y2K effort says. "We spent $100 billion in the United States and built a juggernaut."

The project was the result, he concedes, of his having "snookered" competing corporations and nations into setting aside mutual distrust long enough to recognize the benefits of working together to solve the problem.

"This has been an appropriate first battle of the new millennium, but only the beginning of a need for global cooperation," he says.

The full test of computer systems, which were put at risk by an inability to recognize dates after Dec. 31, 1999, comes Monday with the reopening of businesses and financial markets in the United States. Though it is generally expected that glitches will surface in important computer systems, it is increasingly likely that they will be identified and repaired without major consequences.

"Koskinen is the global hero of Y2K," says Gary Beach, publisher of CIO magazine, a technology industry publication aimed at chief information officers at corporations. "He's the one who pulled together the U.N. and got the world to focus on it."

What Koskinen did was to delicately, slowly and over a period of months after taking office in March 1998 convince those at risk that no entity, corporation, utility or government was going to survive on its own.

The world's networks would be only as strong as their weakest link, he argued. Telecommunications can't function without power; retail industry fails without banking and transportation systems; 911 emergency systems are useless without fuel and oil to provide a response.

"In the private sector, he acted as a catalyst but did not claim he was going to solve their problems. They had to solve them on their own," says Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America.

"He was also a credible voice. Not partisan. When things were going wrong he admitted it, and when they were going right, he said that. Because he was credible, he helped keep fears from escalating."

But how is it that some nations and companies that did nothing to prepare for the arrival of 2000 survived?

"I'm sure some countries did nothing and survived because they had no information technology to speak of," he says. "When we started here, three-quarters of the countries in the world had no plans to do anything. Had they not done anything, those countries would have been as bad off as people were suspecting."

Monday, he says, 173 countries have a Y2K coordinator who share information on an almost daily basis. That was a direct outgrowth of a U.N. international summit Koskinen organized in December 1998.

And, he says, those entities that reportedly were far behind in preparations as recently as four or six months ago, such as 911 emergency systems in the USA, benefited from the experiences of others who Koskinen had drawn together in a structure of 27 working groups and 11 industry consortia.

"I can assure you there isn't a CEO out there who would tell you that this wasn't a major problem and a major challenge," he says.

For the first time, "the world of technology spoke with one voice, and this benefits everybody," says Dick Brown of EDS, one of the nation's leading technology companies, which made $1 billion selling Y2K-related services. "There was a common purpose; we set aside the competition and worked as an industry."

Leverage was the answer

Koskinen reflected on the 21-month-effort and reflected on the experience, which he says he might turn into a book. "Early on, Congress and some other critics said I should have this huge staff and greater authority," he says. "Now, I'm a pretty cheap guy, so when somebody asked me after my first congressional testimony in April 1998 'How big is your staff?' I told them it was me and three other people. I thought it was pretty neat to show that I could run the world with four people."

The media and Congress didn't find it "neat" at all and demanded "a more serious effort" and a staff of thousands, he says.

"I never felt the answer to this problem for the government was a centralized command and control operation. It clearly makes no sense to think you can control it all from one place. What we need to do and did was to leverage existing institutions to take control."

The lynchpins to get companies and countries to cooperate, Koskinen says, were the Washington, D.C.-based associations that link government and industry. He began with the 3,000-member American Association of Association Executives, which broke with its past practices to provide him with its membership list.

"I kid them that I snookered them," Koskinen says. "First, all I wanted to do was send information about Y2K out in their newsletters, and they thought that was fine."

Next he urged them to send out regular alerts related to Y2K.

Weeks later, "we told them that we were creating working groups, and I said, 'We would like you and your industry to be partners with us in these working groups.' "

These groups would become the basis for dissemination of information to assist in Y2K repairs. At the end of the summer, they agreed to provide Koskinen's office with industry progress reports.

Although the largest technology-dependent industries such as power, financial services and telecommunication had been working on the problem for years, "what they needed when we first met with them in spring of 1998 was to break the logjam of information sharing."

"They told us, 'We have a lot of information on how to fix this problem, and we know that others have a lot of information as well, but nobody's talking; nobody's sharing.' "

The turning point, he says, came in the summer of 1998 when Congress passed the Information Readiness and Disclosure Act and guaranteed that companies volunteering information about their Y2K efforts could not be held liable for anything they disclosed. That meant that companies didn't have to be concerned that they would be sued if they acknowledged they were not ready for Y2K.

About that same time, legislation was proposed to increase his staff and to conduct national surveys of industry readiness and develop a plan to protect against failures.

"At a meeting with a couple of legislators, Republicans who shall remain nameless, I noted that the federal government certainly has no ability to make sure that those systems will work, that those are their systems, and I added: 'I thought you guys believed in smaller government.'"

The organization Koskinen has created for reporting and sharing information about the nation's privately held, vital services such as gas, oil, transportation, banking and communications is an accomplishment the federal government has struggled toward for several years.

As part of the Clinton administration initiative to secure cyberspace against the threat of terrorist action or criminal intrusion, there have been several failed initiatives to join industry and government in a cooperative organization.

But before the motivation provided by Y2K, corporate America resisted any alliance with government and insisted that they would handle their own problems.

"They all say, 'Given our druthers we'd rather be on our own,' but the lesson again that all of the senior executives we've been working with support now is that there was tremendous leverage gained by being able to exchange information."

And, he concedes, it's not a coincidence that his organization is in the same building, two blocks from the White House, as the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, which since its creation in May 1998 has sought to join industry and government on computer security matters.

This month, he says, there will be discussions to see whether the apparatus developed for Y2K might serve in the future: "Over the next 5 to 10 years the world is going to become more and more wired, more dependent and vulnerable to these kinds of problems."

Job of a lifetime

Koskinen expects to leave government in March and resume a trip to Egypt he and his wife were on when Vice President Gore urged him to take the Y2K job.

The trip marked his departure from government after serving in the Office of Management and Budget, organizing the early Y2K efforts and managing the federal government during budget showdowns that led to shutdowns in 1994 and 1995. An attorney, Koskinen worked 21 years with The Palmieri Co. and helped reorganize the Penn Central Corp.

"I always knew this was a wonderful job," he says. "If it went well, I'd be forgotten. And if it went poorly, people would wonder for years, "Who was that guy who was supposed to be responsible?"

) Copyright 2000 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

-- observer (anon@work.com), January 05, 2000.

Observer,

Thanks so much! You set a speed record!

It is the last line that I heard about and had to see for myself:

Koskinen reflected on the 21-month-effort and reflected on the experience, which he says he might turn into a book. "Early on, Congress and some other critics said I should have this huge staff and greater authority," he says. "Now, I'm a pretty cheap guy, so when somebody asked me after my first congressional testimony in April 1998 'How big is your staff?' I told them it was me and three other people. I thought it was pretty neat to show that I could run the world with four people."

******

I am reminded of a true story about a military air show that happened maybe thirty years ago. A jeep with a parachute attached was air dropped over an open field. (No one was in the jeep). The parachute failed to open. After the jeep crashed into the ground, the announcer said to the crowd: "Well, folks, what can you say?"

-- abc (abc@ac.dc), January 05, 2000.

From: Y2K, ` la Carte by Dancr (pic), near Monterey, California

Congress passed the Information Readiness and Disclosure Act and guaranteed that companies volunteering information about their Y2K efforts could not be held liable for anything they disclosed. That meant that companies didn't have to be concerned that they would be sued if they acknowledged they were not ready for Y2K.

And here, I thought, and still do, that it meant that companies didn't have to be concerned that they would be sued if they claimed that they were ready for Y2K when they really were not.

-- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage), January 06, 2000.