Olson's Year 2000 Warning Garners Attention
BR Olson's Year 2000 Warning Garners Attention By Dennis McCafferty Staff Writer Pennsylvania photo Pennsylvania Chief Information Officer Larry Olson Pennsylvania Chief Information Officer Larry Olson's efforts to get government information technolo
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Olson's Year 2000 Warning Garners Attention
By Dennis McCaffertyStaff Writer
Pennsylvania photo Pennsylvania Chief Information Officer Larry Olson
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The alarm that Olson is sounding is getting noticed by his counterparts in other states, the Washington-based National Governors Association and the National Association of State Information Resource Executives in Lexington, Ky.
Texas photo Carolyn T. Purcell is both executive director of the state of Texas Department of Information Resources and the president of NASIRE
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Adding to state IT officials' concerns is the much-publicized tardiness of federal government agencies in acknowledging a potential year 2000 crisis. Also, IT insiders consider the current $2.8 billion price tag to fix the federal agency systems to be extremely conservative.
"The states are finding this out for themselves,'' said Mark Evans, executive conference director of the Sacramento, Calif.-based Intergovernmental Technology Conference, a private, for-profit company that stages educational conferences across the country for officials representing state, local and federal government. "I think a summit will be very appropriate. It's going to be a wake-up call. This clearly is going to address the issue, instead of waiting for the year 1999 plus one minute to find out whether the federal government is going to address the issue.''
Evans' company will also stage a conference in which the topic will likely be addressed on Nov. 5-7 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. (For more information, go to the Intergovernmental Technology Conference World Wide Web site at www.govresources.com)
Steve Kolodney, director of the Department of Information Services for the state of Washington and a chief NASIRE leader on year 2000 issues, said states will be left with little choice but to find ways to block the electronic transfer of data from federal systems if the situation fails to improve.
"It would preserve the integrity of state-generated data,'' he said. "You'd then go back to manual input of the federal information, which would be tedious. But you can't allow bad data to sneak into files. There's no way to track it. And, like a virus, it starts to move across the system and, if you have to go back to clean it up, you have a huge and expensive problem.''
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