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The IRS is just barely beyond the halfway point, says John Yost, who heads up the y2k repair project. This should be regarded as the most optimistic official estimate as of late March, 1998.
But this does not include testing, which is at least half of any y2k repair project.
This puts the IRS at around 25%.
This is from ZDNET (April 3).
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Commanding the effort is John Yost, century date change project director at the IRS, in Washington. "In terms of individual components, we are about 55 percent of the way through the implementation," says Yost.
That implementation comprises 80 IBM and Unisys Corp. mainframes, as well as 1,400 minicomputers, including models from Sun Microsystems Inc., Sequent Computer Systems Inc., Pyramid Technology Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. In addition, the IRS has another 130,000 desktop and network devices that must be checked for compliance.
A herculean project in its own right, the conversion process has recently become further complicated by internal changes and outside influences. On April 1, Arthur Gross, CIO of the IRS and the primary Y2K advocate in the agency, resigned from his post. No replacement has been named--which means no Y2K bellwether. This may be dampening the spirits of the Y2K team, which is reportedly looking toward opportunities in the private sector, where the pay is better.
"Because there is huge competition for programmers, the attrition rates have more than doubled over the last two years," admits Yost.
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