Canadian Government Executive - Volume 26 - Issue 01

8 / Canadian Government Executive // January/February 2020 Government executives have earned their aversions based on our professional experience. For me, I’m wary of any passage to a new year that involves the transition from a “9” to a “0” in its last digit. Happily, I plan to have a more relaxing turning into 2020 than I did in 1999 when the new year’s transition found me in the bunker of the BC’s Provincial Emergency Preparedness headquarters with a fluorescent vest, clipboards and satellite phones at hand. Whether Y2K was the world’s greatest fraud or a true global emergency, I had landed in the middle of it – in charge of BC’s province-wide preparation and response to the Year 2000 computer “bug.” TECHNOLOGY By Stuart Culbertson @ T wenty years later, I reflect on Y2K’s legacy, what we learned and what we have forgotten in this one-of-a-kind public sector project – a project with an immoveable deadline. What was Y2K? A refresher As I look back to the turn of the last cen- tury, I am astonished at how much we were in “early days” regarding the impact of information technology (IT) in our lives and work. The first industrial-strength email systems rolled out over rickety dial- up connections had been with us for only a decade. The now-ubiquitous Google was launched as a startup a few years before the century clock turned. And yet, the seeds of our dependency on unstable and immature technologies were already sown, and nowhere was this more evident than in Y2K. So, what was Y2K, and why did it cause such a fuss? The root problem was a flaw imbedded in the operating systems of computers relating to the formatting of calendar dates. The rationale behind the flaw was well-intentioned. To save com- puter memory (a very scarce commod- ity in the pre-Cloud 1990s), IT programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. This meant that the calendar rollover from “99” to “00” could cause systems failure as operat- ing systems faced “this-does-not-compute” date instructions. Importantly, the bug was imbedded in operating systems not amenable to the type of software updates that now course through our computers and cell phones at all hours. Two decades after we successfully swat- ted the Y2K bug, I still hear that Y2K was the greatest scam technology ever per- petrated on an unwitting world. Now, as then, I don’t intend to engage in this ar- gument other than to challenge its propo- nents to name a single organization con- fident enough to do nothing about Y2K. Quick … name one. Managing the Y2K “Fix” When I was appointed BC’s Chief Infor- mation Officer in 1998, I had nowhere