That it went so well is a tribute to the substantial effort people
put in and the unprecedented cooperation and information sharing that
went on between competitors in industries, across industry lines,
between the private and the public sector, and around the world. People
became increasingly willing to share information about where the problem
was and what the fixes for the problem were.
The people who started late got all the advantages of that. One of my favorite examples is about elevators. Two years ago, everyone was focused on elevators. Would they function? There's a maintenance requirement for elevators. The argument was that if the elevators were programmed to stop if they hadn't been maintained, and if they hadn't been made Y2K compliant, they'd think they hadn't been serviced for 99 years, and they'd stop. After a lot of research, people decided that elevators did not have a problem. In 1999, when that became known, people starting late around the world didn't have to worry about elevators. We could tell them not to waste their time and money on elevator problems, but to spend time somewhere else because that is where we found the real problems.
Question: Partnerships are an important part of reinvention. Given the huge success of this partnership to combat the "Bug," what are the lessons learned and the implications of this approach for resolving other problems?
Answer: Well, I think we've learned a lot of good lessons.
One of them is how reliant we are on information technology. I think any
organization of any significance has, for the first time in their history,
an inventory of all their information technology. No government agency
or large private sector company ever had that inventory before. This allowed
them to simply discontinue some systems with no loss of productivity and
to understand the connectivity between systems in a way that wasn't possible
before. We also learned that information technology issues benefit from
leadership at the top! It's not just a question for the individual Chief
Information Officer (CIO).
We also benefitted from an unprecedented amount of cooperation. We had 25 working groups which were true partnerships, across all the critical infrastructure industries such as health care, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, electric power, financial institutions, airlines, and railroads. We ended up with an electronic network of 170 Y2K coordinators around the world after we set up two meetings at the United Nations.
We shared substantial information between the states and with the countries around the world, looking at things like power, customs, and transportation. Now, both the states' CIO's, and the national coordinators around the world, are talking to us about how to continue this dialog and how to continue the partnerships. I think that the precedent has been established that the Federal government can be a catalyst for action without legislating it, without demanding it, and without sending out requirements. We can do it by being an effective partner.
