The Y2K questionsOn January 1st, 2000, the Y2K bug will finally strike, with unforeseeable effects. If the computer systems of the Government, the ESB and Telecom Eireann are affected, so will our phones, electricity, our welfare cheques and the Government's revenue.
. ESB: - Gerry Condon, programme manager for the ESB's overall Y2K programme: . CMOD: (Central government) - Tim Duggan, secretary to the Government's interdepartmental year 2000 monitoring committee: TE: (Telecom Eireann) - Dave Murray, programme director for AD2000 across the Telecom Eireann group of companies:
These questions are a modified form of Ed Yourdon's "10 questions to ask companies", and areused with his permission; Yourdon is the co-author of TimeBomb 2000, and a distinguished systems analyst, programmer and computer guru.
The original questions (put considerably more bluntly), and explanations for those questions are on Yourdon's webpage at www.yourdon.com.
The first five questions are answered this week and the remaining five will be answered in the next issue of Computimes in two weeks' time.
Those who answered the questions are:
I asked the ESB, Telecom Eireann and CMOD, the Department of Finance's Centre for Management and Organisational Development (on behalf of the committee responsible for overseeing Y2K compliance for Government IT systems), 10 fundamental Y2K questions.
Q1: When did your Y2000 project begin?
ESB: "The ESB's project started in May 1996, with a formal impact assessment study which followed on earlier work, and the programme has been under way since then."
CMOD: "The committee started work in December 1997. Every department has its own individual year 2000 project, and they would all have started at different times; in some cases in 1996, in others 1997.
"The Irish government is not like most European and indeed the federal and state governments in the US, in the sense that it does not have a huge amount of mainframe and legacy systems, which those governments would have.
"Typically in the 1970s all European governments started supporting indigenous computer industry, so Britain supported ICL and bought all their kit and software - big mainframes. The same in Germany with Siemens, and in France with Honeywell Bull. There was no homegrown computer industry of that ilk here - big mainframe systems running COBOL and the like - so that didn't happen here.
"A number of the big departments did buy mainframe systems - Revenue Commissioners, Agriculture, Social Community and Family Affairs; and they have the type of problems the central European and American governments have. But they're fairly well advanced - those departments were the first to approach the problem.
"The remainder of the departments use industry-standard computers and off-the-shelf commercial software. That's a different ballgame - you can't go counting the work in terms of lines of code, because there aren't any lines of code if you're using spreadsheets, for instance. So if you want to fix problems, you have to do things like change the way you represent dates, or upgrade a program which is not Y2K compliant. It's a different way of working, and doesn't necessarily take as long, and isn't as difficult to quantify."
TE: "We began to work on AD2000 in the latter half of 1996, leading to the formal establishment of the AD2000 programme office in May, 1997. That came at the back end of assessment since October, 1996, seeking a methodology to approach the problem, and seeking resources to assist us in doing that."
Q2: How big is your inventory of systems that need to be repaired, measured in lines of code and number of systems? How many embedded systems (embedded systems are microchips, which may not be Y2K compliant) do you have?
ESB: "I'd have a difficulty putting numbers on that, because it's not that easily answered in that format. On the IT side we basically have a DEC VAX and IBM installation, with Windows NT installation in the course of being implemented. Obviously our main remedial work is on the VAX and IBM systems.
"There are roughly 7,000,000 to 8,000,000 lines of code all told in those systems, with maybe 6070 different systems. But you're talking about a smaller number of very key critical systems within that.
"Embedded systems are not quite as straightforward, because there are embedded systems all over the place. You'd be talking about thousands, in power stations, on the high-voltage grid, on the low-voltage grid, on controls, on telecoms."
CMOD: "There isn't a central inventory, because the government categorically on a number of occasions has made each department individually responsible for its own year 2000 compliance programme.
"Therefore the committee that is overseeing this does not keep inventory details. What it did was ask for details of the projects that they had, how long they were going to take, what the key tasks would be and when they would be completed, and some other details like the people they had allocated to them, and any difficulties that might arise in that arena. They look for updates every two months to make sure that those timetables and milestones are being met and complied with."
TE: "Almost an unanswerable question for us. Our AD2000 programme started off primarily focused on information technology, which is the one relatively easy to answer in terms of lines of code. At a very early stage we identified that IT systems were only one part of the programme. On the IT side we were looking at half a million lines of code.
"Our programme has four domains: IT; the networks; customer premises equipment (CPE) - all the equipment we have rented or sold to our customers, such as telephones and mobile phones; and the physical and buildings infrastructure - security systems, fire alarms, lifts and so forth. It's almost impossible to quantify those in one common metric. It doesn't scan in lines of code.
"Again, the number of embedded systems do not break down into any one figure because of the number of domains. But in the case of the network, for instance, we've identified 47,000 deployed pieces of equipment from 22 vendors and across 118 product groupings. That's strictly on the network side of the domain. In CPE, we have 50 suppliers and in excess of 600 products."
Q3. How much money have you allocated for your Y2000 project?
ESB: "£11.2 million budgetary provision has been made, to cover the full spectrum of work. Some £4m to £5m of that overall budget is for IT work, the rest covers our network control systems, embedded systems, telecoms, building systems, etc."
CMOD: "Every department gets money for IT expenditure and office equipment and so on in the administrative budgets which run over three years. In addition to this, based on calculations that the departments themselves have made, the government has made available £12.8 million for year 2000 compliance work.
"If you work out the percentages over total IT spend in a year, the Irish government spends roughly £50 million to £55 million on IT every year. About £1.2 billion is spent by the British government every year. If you take it that it's roughly a two-year programme in both events, it's £12.8 million over £108 million in the Irish government, and £393 million over £2.5 billion in Britain. The percentage difference isn't huge.
"When you add in the factor that the British government has an awful lot of legacy systems, and the Irish government doesn't, that accounts for the differentiation."
TE: "We don't propose to let lack of budget stand in the way of delivering on the programme objective. That said, what our budgets indicate from April 1997 to March 2000, the period for which we've put firm forecasts in place, we've indicated between £18 million and £25 million."
Q4. How is the Y2000 budget allocated over the 1996-2000 timeframe - what percentage will be spent in each year? How much is planned to be spent in 2000? What percentage of the overall Y2000 budget was spent before 1st January, 1998?
ESB: "It's very approximate, but our breakout was approximately that 199798-99 would be 10, 60 and 30 per cent respectively. We will have most of our work done in 1998-99, though we would increase staffing over the changeover period. It's really a remedial budget, rather than an operational budget for what we might do during the actual millennium changeover time."
CMOD: "None of the budget is planned to be spent in 2000. Well over 18 months ago, the Department of Finance issued an advice note to every department, detailing things like how to go about developing a year 2000 compliance programme and how you would do inventories and risk analysis. It also set a planning objective of January 1st, 1999. At least 50 per cent of departments are going to hit that without any difficulty.
"A number of others will not hit it on purpose, because they have decided they don't need to ensure that certain items of equipment are compliant by then because their systems are not doing any forward date processing - policy and regulation departments. For the sake of the Exchequer, it makes sense to wait until next year to replace equipment, with the prices coming down dramatically, though they have signed draw-down contracts for that equipment to be supplied."
TE: "The year 2000 budget is held centrally, purely for things to do with the year 2000. We don't cost in our own internal labour, nor any of the major programmes we have in place which have among their objectives dealing with the year 2000. We are replacing most of our financial systems, and one of the reasons would be year 2000, but another is overall business efficiency, and that wouldn't appear in this budget.
"The spend purely on year 2000 would break down into 20 per cent in the fiscal year 1997, probably 60 per cent in 1998, and the remaining 20 per cent in the following year. The year 2000 we haven't forecast yet."
Q5. How many full-time IT professionals have been assigned to the Y2000 project in each of the years between 1996 and 2000?
ESB: "There are about 25 to 30 full-time IT people - that's core IT, not embedded - working directly on the coding of all our applications and systems. Our figure was 40 work-years, and that broke out as 25 people this year, 20 at peak last year and five plus in 1999.
"We were wary of using the lines-of-code method of deciding how many people were needed, and taking the parameters as deciding that roughly 10 per cent of your code would have to be fixed. All sorts of nuances are built into that; it's down to how your code is structured.
"For example, on our DEC systems, we use the Oracle database, which many people around town would do, and it already has four-digit dates in it. But you still have to go in and check the logic of how people move data between screens and programs.
"We had our approach to the year 2000 validated by one of the leading consultants, who looked at how we were finding dates - because there are different ways you can scan - and our approach was vetted. It's not so much the changing; the testing is the important thing. We plan to be finished testing IT systems in Quarter 1, 1999."
CMOD: "You'd have to ask departments how many people have been assigned to their year 2000 projects, because it differs across the board.
"In the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs they have devoted practically their whole IT complement to year 2000 remedial work, over 100 people; Revenue have 60-70 people.
They're the two crux departments, with big legacy systems and the most dealings with the public. They have deferred practically all other IT work."
TE: "At the moment the composition of our AD2000 programme is approximately 30 full-time staff committed to AD2000; in addition to that we have up to 120 people committed to varying degrees. That's based on the fact that like most other people we're tackling the process on a phased basis since you can't do it all simultaneously, therefore handling the most important stuff first and then phasing back. The core of 30 are the project management.
"In addition to that you have people full-time for short periods or part-time for long periods across the organisation."