Time bomb! - Year 2000 transition problem - Industry Trend or Event - Cover Story

Software Magazine, March, 1997 by Patrick L. Porter, Deborah Radcliff

Sheinheit is unclear on how many additional staff and consultants he will hire to complete the date-field work, but he esti- mates he will add several hundred people -- most of them during this year and next. The plan calls for many mission-critical applications to be converted this year, with the rest finished in 1998 -- leaving an entire year for testing. Ultimately for Chase, the key to a successful Year 2000 conversion lies in teamwork. "It is clear that no single group can make it happen," says Robbins. "It's got to be a company-wide effort. Everyone has to be involved or you will come to naught."

Government The CIA's Biggest Issue is Sharing App Information

The CIA has a particularly daunting task bringing its outdated code into Year 2000 compliance. The biggest challenge: tracking down some 3,000, mostly homegrown legacy applications among hundreds of fragmented, departmentalized "mini agencies," access to which is granted only on a need-to-know basis. To complicate matters, the CIA, as well as its Crime and Narcotics Center and the Counter Terrorism Center, must share sensitive data with a dozen other law enforcement and national security organizations, including the FBI and the National Security Agency. "The biggest issue is interoperability," explains Chief Information Officer John Dahms from his seventh-floor office over- looking the wooded west side of the CIA's Langley, Va., campus. "The major effort is to carefully orchestrate the exchange of information from one department and agency to another."

Fans of John LeCarre's spy novels will be disappointed to learn that when the first ripples of the CIA's two-digit date problem surfaced two years ago it did not betray any state secrets or blow a single mole's cover. Instead, an application that handled forward-dividend projections within the agency's employee thrift savings plan malfunctioned when it interpreted the year 2000 as 1900. That was enough for Dahms, however, who quickly ordered the agency's departments to compile an inventory of their client/server and mainframe software -- some of which date back to the CIA's inception 50 years ago. During that year, Dahms worked to educate himself and senior management. His first step was to study the efforts of related agencies and look for best practices. Recalls Dahms, "We looked to the rest of the intelligence community -- the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency." Dahms quickly mastered the basics -- "the steps everyone should take to solve the Year 2000 problem." These, he says, include "awareness, inventory, assessment -- do you want to replace applications, fix the logic or convert the dates? -- and testing." Armed with a strategy, he set out to repair the problem by creating a management framework to address the details. That process culminated in the formation of a 14-person Information Policy Board consisting of department and IS managers. Dahms, who wanted one person accountable for implementing the plan, appointed staff member Sherry Burns as the CIA's Year 2000 project director. Reporting to Burns are four IS managers, one for each of the agency's directorates: Administration, Intelligence, Operations and Science/Technology.