Navy CIO Worried About Restrictive Y2K Legal Provision

It just piles higher and deeper. -- Diane

Breaking News -- Federal Computer Week http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/fcwhome.htm

DECEMBER 1, 1998 . . . 18:14 EDT

Navy CIO worried about restrictive Y2K legal provision

BY BOB BREWIN (antenna@fcw.com)

SAN DIEGO -- The Navy's chief information officer said today that a legal requirement restricting the development or modernization of information technology projects unless the Navy can demonstrate that all of its computer systems are Year 2000-compliant could cause the Navy problems.

Navy CIO Daniel Porter said language in the fiscal 1999 Defense Department appropriations bill that restricts spending on IT modernization unless a Year 2000 fix has been operationally demonstrated on the Navy's 479 mission-critical systems "could bring us to our knees."

Porter, speaking here at the semi-annual Navy Connecting Technology conference, expressed confidence that the Navy and Marine Corps will come close to meeting DOD's internal deadline for developing a Year 2000 fix for all mission-critical systems by Dec. 31. He said a recent telephone survey of key IT program managers uncovered only six mission-critical systems that will not meet the deadline. Early next year, the Navy and the Marines will test the fixes, followed by battle group experiments, Porter said.

Porter said the tests will involve more than artificially rolling the computers' clocks forward to Dec. 31, 1999. "Our test plan involves 37 dates...including leap year and the 99th day of the Julian calendar," he said.

While somewhat sanguine about the progress that the Navy has made in fixing its mission-critical systems, Porter expressed reservations about key, nonmission-critical systems. The Year 2000 compliance of the Navy's pay system "makes me more nervous that anything else," Porter said.

Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig also expressed concern about the status of the pay system at a recent meeting, Porter said. After receiving a brief that expressed confidence that the pay system will enter the New Year with no bugs, Porter said Danzig told him to "assume something will go wrong; work out a [contingency] plan."

Porter also conceded that the Navy may face Year 2000 problems in key support systems -- such as those that support electrical power, water, telephones and elevators -- on its bases around the world because the Navy got a late start on the problem. "We did not come out of the starting block fast enough on installations," Porter said -- a problem compounded by the fact that the Navy has identified 479,000 systems with embedded chips on those bases.

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 02, 1998

Answers

When I was in the Navy, I considered "pay" mission-critical to my family.

If the Admiral is concerned about not being allowed to work on "non-mission-critical system" until all "mission critical" systems are repaired, then all he needs to do is declare "pay" mission critical.

but that would increase the count of things to do" by 1 - which is not nice to bureacrats.

-- Robert A. Cook, P.E. (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), December 03, 1998.