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National Contingency

Topic: Contingency Planning -- Articles

National Contingency Planning for the Year 2000

Industry-by-industry, agency-by-agency and company-by-company, businesses and public institutions are fixing and testing computer systems and embedded devices to achieve year 2000 compliance. Many systems will work, but some will fail. If you have everything under control, you can be sure that one of your suppliers will not. Supposedly compliant systems will also encounter problems. What can you do to address the inevitable failures? You must plan for contingencies.

Year 2000 contingency planning establishes alternative options when an initial plan of action falls short of its goal. Contingency planning means that you must be ready to take action when things do not go as planned, when unforeseen problems arise or when original delivery dates are exceeded. Critical systems, business functions, departments, divisions, government agencies, non-profit organizations and entire industries should have contingency plans in place before the new millennium arrives.

Building a Contingency Plan

Defining who owns the plan is the first step. For a corporation, a contingency owner would be a senior executive. In a government agency, it would be an executive director. At a national level, a task force is required to address the national impact of the year 2000 on trade, the economy and national infrastructure.

Contingency planners must identify functions and related products and services as a means of focusing contingency planning efforts. A park district may not need a contingency plan, but a medical benefits function, essential to the wellbeing of millions of people, would need an extensive plan. Planners should identify all critical functions under the domain of the planning team. Highlighting products and services that are directly or indirectly linked to those functions ensures that nothing is missed. Once this is done, contingency planners should prioritize critical functions, products and services under their control.

Contingency planners, using this list of critical functions, products and services, should identify system or third party dependencies that could ultimately cause a year 2000 failure to occur. This list facilitates the identification of backup options or contingencies for each failure point. For example, if a welfare payment system is down for two weeks, checks could be issued manually. If a customs system failed, the government may extend visas or consider bypassing certain entry or exit requirements for a period of time. If a water system was not producing clean water, a warning to boil the water could be issued to the public. Note that turning off the water could have a dire and unintended impact on fire systems and industries.

Crisis Management

Once a basic set of plans has been drafted, planning teams will need to identify the personnel, material, equipment, authority and funds to ensure that these plans can be delivered. This process begins to move the contingency planning team into the crisis management phase of the project. The need for crisis management begins when more year 2000-related failures are encountered than can be addressed in a typical business cycle by the current support infrastructure.

Crisis planning teams establish command and control strategies, escalation procedures, staffing plans, equipment requirements, contingency invocation procedures and funds to the support this phase of the year 2000 transition. The crisis management phase of the year 2000 will likely begin on or near 01/01/2000 and continue until normal operating conditions can be reestablished.

Other than having considered the various contingency options in advance, command and control procedures are the most important element of a crisis management plan. This requires knowing who is in charge and who can make decisions in the absence of a higher authority. If communications are cut off to a public or private sector entity, that entity must be able to act independently until communications and other infrastructure functions are reestablished. This strategy comes from military models where links to a central point of control may not exist during a period of engagement.

Contingency Planning at a National Level

In cases where year 2000 work has been delayed to a point where officials anticipate a high degree of public and private sector failures, industry groups and government oversight committees should consider umbrella contingencies. For example, if a port authority anticipates poor readiness in port control, navigation or shipping systems, shipping companies should work with trade departments to create backup plans for a slowdown in food or fuel imports. Similar coordination is required to ensure operational continuity in other transportation domains, communication and power infrastructures, financial services, emergency management and a host of other areas.

Crisis management should likewise be established at a national or industry level to ensure that activities are closely coordinated and monitored. This will avoid situations where separate contingency plans work at cross-purposes against each other. For example, if an environmental reporting system goes offline, industry and government groups should jointly plan to lift environmental reporting requirements so that critical industries do not shut down. Similarly, if a power company decides to pull itself off of the power grid, other power providers may want to avoid doing so.

Throughout the crisis management phase, centralization of communication is key to successfully navigating the millennium transition. A national task force can do this by establishing various areas of authority to manage year 2000 issues unique to power, communications, food, energy, financial services, healthcare, emergency management and other sectors. This task force should be pulled together quickly and coordinate industry contingency plans in order to be ready for the crisis management transition phase.

If these contingency strategies make little sense to you or the officials running your business or government, then the full scope of the year 2000 problem has not yet revealed itself to you. The United States has created a President's Counsel that monitors many of the industry sectors discussed here. In addition to this, various industry groups are coordinating industry-wide contingency plans to work effectively as a team and avoid conflict during the transition window. A national task force addresses these needs. Contingency planning and crisis management should begin soon, before time runs out.

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