ITAA's Year 2000 Outlook
August 7, 1998                         Volume 3, No. 30

Published by the Information Technology Association of
America, Arlington, VA

Bob Cohen, Editor bcohen@itaa.org

Read in over 70 countries around the world

ITAA's Year 2000 Outlook is published every Friday to
help all organizations deal more effectively with the
Year 2000 software conversion.  To create a
subscription to this free publication, please visit
ITAA on the web at https://www.itaa.org/transact/2ko
utlooksub.htm.  To cancel an existing subscription,
visit https://www.itaa.org/transact/2kremove.htm.

ITAA's Year 2000 Outlook is sponsored in part by CACI
International Inc., DMR Consulting Group Inc., and
Y2Kplus

Critics Charge FAA Missing Connections on Y2K
Preparedness

The Federal Aviation Administration flew into another
round of Y2K flak this week, triggered in part by Joel
Willemssen, director of civil agencies information
systems at the General Accounting Office (GAO).
Appearing before the House Science Committee 's
Technology Subcommittee, Willemssen questioned whether
the FAA can complete its conversion in the time
remaining.  "With less than 17 months to go, FAA must
still correct, test, and implement many of its
mission-critical systems.  It is doubtful that F AA can
adequately do all of this in the time remaining,"
Willemssen said.

Conceding a slow start, the FAA said it will complete
its work in June 1999-three months beyond the Office of
Management and Budget imposed deadline.  Regardless,
the agency maintained that it is making progress.
According to Dennis DeGaetano, FAA Deputy Associate
Administrator, his agency has completed almost 14
months of work on Y2K repairs in the past six months.
"I am pleased to report that as of July 31, 1998, we
have renovated 66.7% of all FAA mission-critical
systems," he said.  DeGaetano said th e June deadline
reflects a compressed schedule-originally FAA projected
a November 1999 complete date.

But Willemssen says the FAA's estimates may be
unrealistic: "One reason is that officials are counting
on a steep rise in the pace of completion activity."
He pointed out that the FAA schedule requires 42 of 157
systems to complete renovation by the end of next
month.  Validation and implementation schedules
indicate similarly large one month jumps.  Moving
tested and validated systems from the FAA technical
center to field sites, a task Willemssen called
complex, time-consuming and difficult, is due to be
conducted in just three months.  "As a comparison, an
FAA official responsible for maintaining the Host
Computer System stated that it generally takes 4 to 6
weeks to test and implement a single modification once
it has been deployed to the en route c enters,"
Willemssen said.

Willemssen said the FAA has no handle on data exchanges
and limited time to perform end to end system testing.
International coordination also appears fogged by
incomplete information.  The GAO official said that the
FAA has informal Y2K status informati on on 21 of 90
nations to which U.S. carriers fly and none on the
remaining 69 countries.

Not surprisingly, the FAA met with something of a
turbulent reaction on Capitol Hill.  According to
Subcommittee Chairwoman Connie Morella (R-MD):
"…despite FAA's new found dedication to fix the Year
2000 problem, the FAA had such a late state that it may
not be able to complete the job.  While I do not want
to be pessimistic about the FAA, I am reminded that a
pessimist is simply a well-informed optimist, and with
less than 16 months left before the immovable deadline,
the General Accounting Office is no w casting serious
doubts that the FAA will be Year 2000 compliant by the
Year 2000."  Sen.  Bob Bennett (R-UT) also issued a
statement saying that the FAA's assertions of progress
"won't fly."

Another Hill source was even more blunt.  He said the
disparity between GAO and FAA assessments indicates
anything from a Pollyanna-ish view on the part of the
FAA to "seriously misleading the American public."
According to this source, "the FAA isn't ly ing but
their assumptions give one pause.  Some systems have
been taken off the table for replacement.  These
[replacement systems] must be purchased and implemented
in the next [several] months, but they have not yet
been put out for bid.  The FAA has a poor history of
procurement.  This demonstrates that they may be
seriously undermining their own efforts by
overestimating their capabilities."

FDIC Says Bank Ratings on Y2K Confidential

In a letter to bank executives last month, Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Director Nicholas
J. Ketcha Jr. indicated his agency had better not catch
insured financial institutions disclosing the results
of their FDIC Y2K assessment ratings.  Ketcha wrote
that "Under Part 309 of the FDIC's rules and
regulations, disclosure of reports of examination, or
any information contained in them, is strictly
prohibited.  Accordingly, institutions may not disclose
results from Year 2000 assessments…" Th e FDIC official
said disclosure to financial ratings firms or fidelity
bond carriers is also prohibited and requests from such
entities are not authorized by his agency.  "In light
of the blanket prohibition on disclosing ratings,
compilations of Year 200 0 ratings by such firms are
necessarily incomplete and unreliable."  Ketcha said
that while disclosure of FDIC rating information is
verboten, his agency encourages financial institutions
to disclose their own information about steps taken to
address the Y2K issue.

New Disclosure Bill Seeks to Protect Accurate
Statements

A new Y2K disclosure bill tries to improve on the Good
Samaritan legislation introduced last week by the
Clinton Administration.  Reps.  David Dreier (R-CA) and
Anna Eshoo (D-CA) have introduced "narrowly focused"
legislation to encourage private-sector in formation
sharing on Y2K.  Like the Good Samaritan bill, the new
legislation would protect companies from liability
lawsuits for unknowingly false statements.  Critics
have charged, however, that accurate statements might
also be used against makers in li ability lawsuits.
The Dreier-Eshoo bill addresses both sets of concerns,
permitting firms to release "Year 2000 Information
Disclosures."  These written, labeled statements would
be protected from use in any civil litigation related
to Y2K failures.

Swedes Say Y2K Situation Growing Acute

A Swedish IT trade group has written Prime Minister
Goran Persson that the government is doing little to
assure a smooth transition to the Year 2000.
IT-Foretagen, the Association of Swedish IT companies,
says "far too little is being done, by far too fe w,
and without any particular coordination…It is clear
that the Year 2000 problem will mean upheavals in
business and industrial operations, since far from all
IT systems will be revamped in time.  Operational
disturbances in all areas of society are unav oidable."
Calling for greater political leadership, the group
calls on the government to mobilize against the Year
2000 problem without delay, to appoint a national Y2K
leader, to launch an information campaign and to take
related steps.

Exec Says PC Misconceptions May Damage Y2K Clean Up

Where in the world is Karl Feilder?  Hong Kong, Tokyo,
Seattle, Toronto, London, Johannesburg.  These are just
names on a well-thumbed calendar to this man on a
mission.  The former C programmer is an adviser to
governments, a frequent conference speaker, and an
entrepreneur.  And he has made a business out of
knowing more about the impact of Y2K on PCs and PC
software than anybody else.  That knowledge has put
Feilder into his global orbit.

Feilder is president of Greenwich Mean Time, a firm he
started in 1995.  Greenwich Mean Time software tools
help companies determine whether they have Y2K problems
with their PCs or PC software.

Misconception number one is that Y2K is a mainframe
matter, and that date handling problems at the desktop
will not be painful.  Greenwich Mean Time believes
there are roughly 430 million PCs in use around the
world today.  The firm cites Gartner Group re search
claiming that 64 percent of mission critical
applications reside on PCs.  According to Feilder, date
deficiencies could lurk in the PC BIOS, operating
system, applications, data or interfaces between
programs.

Misconception number two is that late model PCs are
probably Y2K OK.  Feilder's firm has tested 500
machines for Y2K compliance.  Ninety-three percent of
those manufactured prior to 1997 failed the
examination.  Forty-seven percent of those PCs produced
in the first half of 1997 tanked the test and 21
percent of those built in the second half of last year
still had problems.  The good news is that the fail
rate is headed in the right direction; the bad news is
that, according to Feilder, 11 percent of P Cs built in
the first half of this year were still tripped up by a
couple of zeros.

A third misconception is that Y2K will not bug most PC
software.  In fact, Greenwich Mean Time takes issue
with 64 percent of the PC software titles it has tested
(now over 5000 programs).  Feilder says 28 percent of
this date-challenged software is call ed Y2K compliant
by manufacturers.  Not that these programs will
rollover and die on January 1, 2000.  But if they are
overlooked, not so funny things could start happening.

Perhaps that is why Feilder views the Y2K compliance
landscape in shades of gray.  "Some [PC programs] are
more problematic than others," Feilder says, noting
that his company has defined 73 categories of risk for
this type of software.  The top five most frequent
glitches include incompatible date windowing formats,
licensed background applications which lock up when the
date is advanced, behind the screen date manipulation,
leap year calculations, and programs which flat out
can't handle a Year 2000 dat e.

Of course companies can't fix computer resources they
do not know they have in inventory.  Take the example
of one large bank Feilder and company have assisted.
This particular institution tallied its PC installed
base at 63,000 units.  Greenwich Mean Ti me found
110,000 such devices.  This runaway inventory is, of
course, an extreme example.  But Feilder says
organizations often don't know plus or minus ten
percent how many machines they have in-house.  Or
software applications.  Feilder's firm ran a test of
just 10 PCs at one cellular phone manufacturer and
identified 37 unauthorized software programs.  The
cellular phone company has 45,000 PCs (or thinks it
does).  "[My client] almost had a heart attack,"
Feilder says.  He also says that the PC mark etplace is
misunderstood.  Old does not necessarily mean out the
window for much of this software; on the contrary,
plenty of firms are still using DOS and Windows 3.1
applications, he says.

For many organizations, PCs may be the Achilles heel of
the data center-ic Y2K remediation program.  Feilder
says firms don't know what software and data has been
delegated to the desktop or how it is used.  "People
have lost track," he claims, noting tha t some
companies allow their employees to buy computers on
credit cards.

Greenwich Mean Time's tool, Check 2000, helps companies
figure out what they have in operation, along with
which hardware, operating systems, software and data
files may be impacted by the century rollover.

Closer to Home

This week ITAA announced two more firms have received
ITAA*2000 certification: Business Computer Services,
Inc., a subsidiary of Florida-based ABR Information
Services, Inc.; and Visionet Systems, Inc. of
Princeton, New Jersey.  ITAA*2000 is the industry' s
century date change certification program.  The program
examines processes and methods used by companies to
perform their Year 2000 software conversions.  Both
participated in a rigorous evaluation of their
approaches to date conversion, with extensive analysis
in eleven discrete process areas deemed necessary to a
successful Year 2000 conversion.

Outlook Declares Hiatus

ITAA's Year 2000 Outlook takes itself off-line the week
of August 14 and will return August 21.

Business to Business

Syntel, Inc., Troy, MI, has won a multi-million dollar,
multi-year Y2K contract with Borders Group, Inc.

Accelr8 Technology Corporation, Denver, CO, has
announced the release of Ignition 2000, a free scanning
tool.

Alydaar Software Corporation, Charlotte, NC, has been
awarded a Y2K contract by Crown Books.

Century Technology Services, Inc., McLean, VA, has
announced the availability of its new Century Processor
Remediation system, which provides comprehensive
inventory, tracking and reporting capabilities for an
organization's embedded systems.

MatriDigm Corporation, San Jose, CA, has been awarded a
Y2K contract by Wells Fargo & Co.

ITAA Y2K Information Center

Solution Providers Directory
http://www.itaa.org/script/2000vend.cfm

ITAA*2000 Certification Program
http://www.itaa.org/2000cert.htm

Outlook Archive
http://www.itaa.org/script/get2klet.cfm

Legislative and Litigation Table
http://www.itaa.org/Y2Klaw.htm

Calendar
http://www.itaa.org/y2kcal.htm

Vendor/User Status Questionnaires
http://www.itaa.org/questmain1.htm


For more information, please send email to
info@y2kplus.com, visit our web site at
http://www.y2kplus.com or call Dave Ehlke at
781-863-8111.

Copyright ITAA 1998.  All rights reserved.  The
Information Technology Association of America, 1616 N.
Fort Myer Drive, Suite 1300, Arlington, VA 22209.
Internet: http:\\www.itaa.org