Strategic Management of Information and Communication Technology The United States Air Force Experience with Y2K (2007) / Chapter Skim
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These lessons and related recommendations are described in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, and they cover the management of ICT complexity, aligning organizational and ICT strategies, and minimizing and mitigating ICT risk. A final brief concluding chapter focuses on the general lesson of viewing technology risk within its social and organizational context.
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The Air Force encompasses nine major commands and has a complex organization for managing and funding ICT. Responsibility lies in the Chief Information Officer's office, but as in other large and diverse organizations, there is a wide gap between the executive agency and the distributed, frontline, operational management and use of ICT.
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Lessons for Managing ICT Complexity Participants in the Air Force's response to Y2K learned more about organizational operation and management than about technology. It became clear that traditional management strategies based on localized response would not be effective and that a more comprehensive approach was needed.
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Early on, it became clear that it would be impossible for individual commands and units to define the problem, set priorities, and track response efforts on their own. For example, commands and units made attempts to stratify response needs by the criticality of the system, the likelihood of an adverse occurrence, local conditions, and optimal response strategies.
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ICT management tends to focus on short-term needs, is technically based, and occasionally experiences failures as part of the job. Strategic management of an organization tends to be negotiated, focuses on longer-term and wider-range impacts, and can view failure as career threatening.
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For instance, Y2K evolved across Air Force organizational layers in two directions: initially, as locally identified problem-solving activities that evolved up into centrally managed initiatives, and later, as a centrally managed initiative that evolved down into locally driven problem-solving activities. The evolution of ICT projects in both directions generates tensions across organizational layers.
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Some Air Force ICT managers tried to build on this experience post-Y2K. Yet, maintaining the resource stream and management practices (for example, the use of block release dates)
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• Empower permanent organizational entities focused on cross-boundary issues. No permanent unit within the Air Force had the scope and authority to manage a crossorganizational ICT project like Y2K.
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The Year 2000 Information Disclosure Act specified that a "good faith" effort to discover and address potential Y2K problems would immunize organizations from liability. The Air Force adopted a higher, "due diligence" standard.
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The Social and Organizational Context of Technology Risk Since Y2K was not an external hostile threat, it did not fit easily into existing categories of information security. Y2K showed that threats can come not only from intentional actions of a conscious enemy but also from the unintentional consequences of our own actions, confounded by the complexities of the ICT system itself, the environments within which this system operates, and our inability to adequately manage these complex interactions.
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From page 11... ...
Understanding these risks makes risk management and planning for mitigation far more productive. In the end, the Y2K experience helped introduce the Air Force and other technology-based organizations to a human, organizational and social perspective on technology risk.
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