Y2K's Legacy: Not a Waste

Writer Farhad Manjoo has an article on Slate about the government's victory over the Year 2000 computer bug, 10 years later. In brief, computers didn't crash as date fields clicked over from 99 (for 1999) to 00 (for 2000) as was widely feared because the federal government, working in concert with companies and other countries, worked to rewrite software code to show four digits for years instead of two.

Because cities weren't plunged into darkness, bank accounts didn't disappear and emergency services didn't come to a screeching halt, critics said the federal government overreacted and spent way too much money on what they saw was a phantom bug.

Reading the piece reminded me of what one of the top executives in charge of the federal government's Y2K program told me shortly after the New Year: "It just goes to show you, no good deed goes unpunished."

But in his first of a two-part series on what the Y2K experience yielded, if anything, Manjoo says a lot of good came from the intense work. Here are some of his highlights:

--"Y2K helped bring tech managers to greater prominence within their organizations, and it arguably sparked the boom in tech outsourcing."

--"It's the only recent example of something exceedingly rare in America--an occasion when we spent massive amounts of time and money to improve national infrastructure to prevent a disaster."

--"The 9/11 Commission Report says that the Y2K threat spurred a round of information sharing within the government unlike any other in recent times. The last few weeks of December 1999 were 'the one period in which the government as a whole seemed to be acting in concert,' the commission reported. It added: 'After the millennium alert, the government relaxed.'"

--"For the first time, top executives had to defer to tech people, who were called upon to take on management duties in companies -- to find all the systems vulnerable to Y2K and look for the cheapest ways to solve them."

--"This remains one of the most interesting facts about Y2K -- the whole world worked together to prevent an expensive problem. . . . Many of our thorniest problems share these features: global warming, health care policy, the federal budget, disaster preparedness."

I'd add one more to Manjoo's list: Y2K opened the minds of non-IT executives to other problems that a networked world presented that could be just as catastrophic: namely cybersecurity. Government IT executives at the time said the same effort applied to Y2K should now be applied to fixing the porous federal computer systems that sat wide open for anyone to infiltrate. It turns out they were dead on right. But, unfortunately, it didn't happen, even when electronic government was becoming the hot management topic and was given prominence in President Bush's management agenda. It took nearly another 10 years before the government began to mobilize anything resembling a Y2K-like force to take on cybersecurity. And we're still playing catch up.

But as federal tech managers said then, Y2K provided a hard, fast deadline they had to meet. They had no choice but to meet it. With security, there is no immovable deadline. And we all know what happens when you don't have a hard deadline to meet.