Y2K All Over Again.

I remember the months leading up to Dec 31,1999. In the world of I.T., everyone does. We were all scrambling to remedy Y2K - caused by the condition whereby in databases throughout the U.S. (and the world), the year was formatted using two decimals.

I was a CIO at the time and remember the incredulity on my peers' faces when I described the condition and the possible outcomes. After some debate, I was able to marshal some incremental funding and directed all our efforts to review tens of thousands of lines of code, to remedy the situation. Not only was this an issue for custom development, operating systems needed to be patched, old legacy applications needed investigating and desktop applications needed to be at a sufficient rev level to address the "invisible" problem.

My business counterparts weren't happy. Their new system had to wait while we remedied Y2K.

My whole team worked extremely hard and we made it though, without a hiccup - as did most of the I.T. world. There were precious few examples of systems breaking down. In fact, after all was said and done, I think that I.T. professionals suffered for all their hard work.

There were so few examples of system failure, that many business leaders thought the entire situation was entirely overblown. In many executives' minds, the problem wasn't invisible - there was never any problem to begin with.

I tell this story, because this week in Minneapolis a major bridge collapsed. This has received around the clock news coverage. This bridge collapse, say some, should be an early warning - a call to address a crumbling national infrastructure. A situation which could take $1.6 Trillion dollars to fix.

Some estimate that we are only spending 20% of the funds necessary to keep our roads, bridges, tunnels, levies and dams and electrical grids in good repair. Even for new projects, TIME magazine will be reporting that we aren't building new/replacement infrastructure even close to the durability standards that some countries do. In fact, the newly rebuilt levies in New Orleans are NO MORE DURABLE (built for the same 100 year lifespan) than the ones which were washed away by a Level 2 hurricane two years ago.

The problem is real, but the perception is that all is well. Unless bridges begin collapsing on a weekly basis, the news crews will return back to Washington and New York and move on to the next story. The events in Minnesota will be perceived as just a statistical abnormality - a freak of nature. We'll all start thinking that it can't happen here, in my backyard. We'll resume thinking about infrastructure health by how many potholes need fixing in our local roads or whether the state gets federal funding for that new highway.

It's Y2K all over again. Except this time, no one's listening.