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The Federal Reserve has announced that it has completed the planning phase. According to the California White Paper, assessment precedes planning, and assessment is 5%. Inventory is 1%. "Planning and solution design" is 15%. I presume that the Fed has here substituted the word "planning" for "inventory." FRB Board Governor Kelley asserted in his July 30 testimony to the Senate Banking Committee that the Fed has completed the inventory phase. The language of the Fed's report indicates that "planning and solution design" are still in progress. Here is the Fed's declaration in its first newsletter regarding "planning":
"The planning stage has been completed and Federal Reserve staff currently is assessing potential obstacles or identifying coding issues for many of our hardware and software systems." The phrase, "identifying coding issues," sounds like what the California White Paper calls "planning and solution design."
The Fed admits that testing is 50% of the project:
"Unfortunately, this is not a problem that can be fixed overnight, or even in a day or two. In fact, depending on the business, the move to a CDC-compliant software and hardware environment may be a multi-year project. Most business consultants in the financial services industry estimate that once the recoding process is complete, testing alone will take approximately 50 percent of the overall project effort. The testing process is critical to verifying that the modifications made will ensure correct processing for the year 2000 and beyond." (www.frbsf.org/fiservices/cdc/cdcnews/problem.html )
The list of "things to do" is long. The list of "things accomplished" is almost nonexistent, unless you count creating a Web page, a newsletter, and a y2k awareness videotape.
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To ensure success for the CDC project, the following activities are being undertaken:
Coordination of resources throughout the Federal Reserve System to provide recommendations for common solutions and resolution of cross-functional issues;
Development of an overall CDC project plan, including timetables for the various century date change milestones, such as guideline dates for compliance, testing, and implementation;
Identification of vendors that can provide support to the readiness effort;
Identification of date vulnerabilities within the Federal Reserve's computer systems;
Tracking of vendor, cross-district, and cross-application issues;
Promotion of awareness of the problem to all Districts, business areas, and business partners;
Identification of areas in which common, Systemwide approaches to CDC issues will contribute to the success and cost control of the overall project;
Recommendation of Systemwide guidelines and standards, where applicable, on date format and usage;
Recommendation of the acquisition of common mainframe tools and services, where applicable, that will contribute to the success of the overall project;
Establishment of certification criteria for application compliance;
Identification of system and inter-application dependencies for modifications and testing; and
Facilitation of the exchange of information related to CDC activities between Districts, Central Applications, Central Bank functions, Product Offices, the Board of Governors, the Treasury, FRAS and the SFO.
All readiness activities for mission-critical applications and products (e.g., Accounting, ACH, Billing, Checks, Fiscal Services, Funds, Statistics, Fedline) will be completed by mid-year 1998; all nonmission-critical compliance readiness activities are targeted for completion by year-end 1998. This will provide users and external entities with testing opportunities and a time cushion for unexpected problems or delays in order to ensure timely completion of readiness activities.
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