July 6, 1999
To:Policy and Finance Committee
From:Commissioner Corporate Services
Subject:Year 2000 Priority One Business Functions Status Report July 1999
Purpose:
The Year 2000 Business Continuity Plan Status Report (July 1999) outlines the following information as requested by
Council at its November 1998 meeting:
Status report of each Priority 1 business function (June 25, 1999)
Status report on the ABC's and their state of readiness
Status report on expenditures for priority 1 Year 2000 functions (June 30, 1999)
Change requests
Funding Sources:
No funding is required at this time.
Recommendations:
It is recommended that:
This report be received for information
The Policy and Finance Committee refer this report to Council for its information.
Comments:
Communications
The City of Toronto year 2000 householder, 'We're OK with Y2K" was distributed by Canada Post to all residences and
businesses in the City of Toronto. The objective of this document is to educate the public on this important issue and to
inform them of the City of Toronto's readiness program. Information on how to contact the City for additional details was
provided in 14 languages. The feedback from the public has been excellent.
The City has continued to take a proactive approach to year 2000 communications. Over the past month, each of the 6
District Health Councils have held year 2000 planning meetings. The City of Toronto has attended each of these meetings
to provide an update on the City's readiness program. The Toronto Star published a short article on the City's program
status. This was followed up by a live radio interview with CFRB radio.
Status report on Priority One business functions (Appendix 1)
Work on the departmental priority 1 business functions is progressing as scheduled. Currently 16 business functions have
been successfully year 2000 tested and are being re-deployed. These include critical public impact services such as water
supply, traffic lights, social assistance and children services.
External Partners & Agreements - The City of Toronto has received responses from approximately 30% of its critical
suppliers. A significant number of suppliers have been operating without adequate documentation. This is being addressed
as part of this program.
Facilities To date the inventory of 450 buildings have been re-verified.
Fleet - The inventory of all fleet vehicles have been completed and 6,000 vehicles owned or leased by the City have been
identified including certification of Fire and Ambulance vehicles, coordination of Police vehicle certification, certification
of salt/sand or snow removal vehicles and solid waste vehicles. The strategy here is to assess all fleets by the manufacturer,
model and year and not by the vehicle. 400 manufacturers will be assessed, 250 systems will be tested and 100 will be
remediated. A prioritization approach is in place where all critical 1 vehicle will be done first.
Desktop - The desktop rollout is progressing as planned. At present approximately fifty percent of all the desktop units
have been remediated.
Servers - The Project is currently running according to schedule. At present, 125 servers have been implemented.
Mainframes - All mainframe code remediation, which includes priority 2 and 3 applications, will be completed by the end
of July 1999. Testing is active on the priority 1 applications in the City's year 2000 test partition running at EDS. The
Public Health system, which previously ran on the North York mainframe, has been upgraded by SAGA and migrated to
the EDS mainframe environment. Upon completion of the migration and remediation of this application the City of
Toronto will be able to retire the North York mainframe, which is not year 2000 ready.
Networks - Currently work is progressing as scheduled for both the voice and data networks. Work is underway to address
the 48 non-compliant voice systems by August 1999.
Clean Management
The City's Year 2000 plan is extremely comprehensive, and includes a strict Clean Management strategy. This strategy
protects the Corporation of the City of Toronto by introducing necessary safeguards to sustain Year 2000 readiness after
Year 2000 application testing has been completed.
The Year 2000 Clean Management strategy includes or ensures that:
All goods and services acquired by the City of Toronto are year 2000 ready.
The suppliers have a year 2000 readiness program to ensure that they will be able to continue offering services to the City.
A strict change management process is implemented to ensure that new year 2000 problems are introduced.
Completed and in-process work for year 2000 readiness is protected from other parallel activities that are not yet Year 2000
ready.
Year 2000 Clean Management awareness for all staff.
Departments are required to confirm on a regular basis that they are adhering to the Clean Management guidelines.
The change management process implemented as part of this strategy will provide additional benefits beyond the Year
2000 by strengthening the City's system management practices. This "best practice" assures that the City's application
systems remain year 2000 ready after testing and certification is completed. The Clean Management procedures are
implemented immediately after the baseline test is established for an application. Any new releases or fixes to existing
applications must be reviewed, approved and possibly retested to ensure continued year 2000 readiness. Finally, the year
2000 test data will be retained to demonstrate that the tests worked initially and to provide a baseline in support of future
tests.
With respect to outside vendors: (1) all acquisitions are handled through Purchasing. Year 2000 readiness warranties and
liabilities are part of all Request for Proposals or Quotations, Purchase Orders and contract documents issued, and (2) all
existing contracts with key suppliers are being renegotiated to ensure Y2K issues are being addressed.
Increasingly, external stakeholders such as key vendors and suppliers are requesting information on the City's Year 2000
readiness. Strategies such as these are part of the overall readiness program being adopted by the City of Toronto's Year
2000 Program to ensure that the City will deliver business as usual on January 1, 2000 and beyond.
Y2k Contingency Planning
The Year 2000 problem is being addressed by two separate but related activities. One activity is remediation: the process of
identifying and remediating all computer systems and devices that are unable to correctly handle dates in the year 2000 and
beyond. The second activity is year 2000 contingency planning: the process of identifying and mitigating "residual" risks
posed by the program efforts and project time constraints. (Appendix 2, the first attached diagram, represents an overview
of the Year 2000 Contingency Planning process that has been implemented for the City) .
In the City of Toronto, Business Resumption Planning (BRP) is the responsibility of each department. The City of
Toronto's Year 2000 Project provides contingency planning consulting services to assist them in this activity. The Year
2000 Project Management has set a deadline of June 30, 1999 for all priority 1-business cases to complete their year 2000
contingency plans. September 30, 1999 for all priority 1-business case contingency plans to be tested / walked-through, and
December 15, 1999 for the establishment of the City's precautionary posture for the year 2000 transition.
In the November 25th - 27th, 1998 Council Report it was recommended that additional funds for year 2000 contingency
plans for priority 1-Business Cases be requested once the strategy and costs had been identified. The Year 2000 Steering
Committee has recommended using the year 2000 project contingency fund as the interim source of funding for priority 1
contingency plans. All funding requests will be handled through the existing change request process.
Contingency plans are backup plans and provide a second level of defense against a major failure. Year 2000 contingency
plans are being developed to address a specific type(s) of failure:
Priority 1 business cases failing to complete its project in time.
The application systems remediated under a priority 1 business case failing to have been properly repaired.
A Year 2000 contingency plan is meant to restore some level of stability to the priority 1 business processes once a failure
has occurred. It should be noted that a contingency plan is intended to reduce the impact of a failure but not necessarily
achieve the same outcome as if the failure had not occurred.
The following "mission" and "objective" have been laid out for the City's Year 2000 Project Management Office
contingency planning function:
Mission Statement
"To enable the priority 1 business case teams to harness the information and relationships they have and parallel the
development of contingency workarounds that may be required in Year 2000."
Objectives:
To develop a viable contingency plan for priority 1 business cases
To determine the potential cost of mitigating year 2000 risks
To transfer skills in contingency planning to the business areas
To ensure ownership of the contingency plan by the business division/unit
To use existing resources and related work as inputs to the contingency planning process
Finally, specific Year 2000 contingency plans form only one element of a Department's overall Business Resumption Plan
(BRP). The effectiveness of a specific priority 1 business case continuity plan is highly dependent upon its integration with
the Department's BRP.
The second diagram (Appendix 3) positions the context and the scope of where year 2000 contingency plans fit within a
Department's overall approach to BRP planning. BRP should not be approached as a technical project. BRP should be
treated as a top business priority by senior management. The focus is on core business activities; that is, those on which the
survival of the business depends. The contingency plans developed to address the Year 2000 scenario comprise one of the
books on a bookshelf of the various emergency, continuity, labour disruption plans that the City has created over the past
30 years to ensure 'Business as usual'.
Agencies, Boards and Commissions (ABC)
The ABC Team hosted an awareness session for the agencies, boards, commissions and other related organizations with
which the City has a notification responsibility. The objective of the session was to provide information about the year
2000 issue and possible impacts, the City's readiness program, information sharing opportunities and contact information.
One-on-one meetings have also been held with the co-ordination organizations such as Toronto Hydro and Toronto Police.
General program reviews have been initiated.
Status Report on Toronto Hydro - June 30, 1999
Toronto Hydro Year 2000 activities are now focused on implementation of corrective actions, testing and contingency
planning. A test lab has been established and verification testing of major systems is now under way. Some verification
testing of Year 2000 ready systems, which do not affect our normal delivery of electrical power, will extend beyond the
general target date.
To ensure that test plans and progress of remediation/testing are satisfactory to Toronto Hydro senior management, meeting
have been organized between the Hydro Year 2000 project team and the relevant senior vice-presidents and his or her
direct reports. The Hydro Year 2000 project team is providing a detailed progress report for each area and highlighting
items that may require executive approval for exception from testing. At the end of the testing phase, the Hydro Year 2000
project team will present a package of information including testing methodologies, procedures and results for review and
sigh-off by each senior vice-president.
Contingency planning for both electrical distribution and business systems has started. This planning will be based on
Hydro's existing power restoration processes and on plans developed for other emergency planning activities.
Although Hydro expects a smooth transition to the new millennium, Hydro will still have to plan for even the most
unlikely events. Contingency planning involves the development of alternative work processes in the event of system
failures, including Year 2000 failures, which may occur despite Toronto Hydro's best efforts.
The vice-president of electrical distribution infrastructure is heading the company-wide Year 2000 contingency planning
team, which is responsible for overall coordination, emergency response event management, as well as all external and
internal communications. The Toronto Hydro's Year 2000 project office will report to the contingency planning team and
will focus on the development of individual contingency plans for systems and processes. Toronto Hydro have brought an
IBM contingency planning specialist into their Year 2000 project office to assist in contingency planning for business
systems. This contingency planning effort will also provide the framework for the ongoing development of emergency
recovery plans during and beyond the Year 2000. Toronto Hydro's IBM consultant will work with managers of each of the
six Year 2000 groupings, to assist in identifying essential business processes and systems and developing a plan to deal
with them.
Toronto Hydro continues to track its steady progress to Year 2000 readiness through a progress tracking system. On June
21, remediation and testing of their electrical distribution systems were substantially completed. They will continue to
work in verification of Year 2000 ready systems and deployment of systems that do not affect our capability to deliver
energy to its customers. The creation of contingency plans will represent completion of the final step in addressing overall
Year 2000 readiness.
Status report on the City of Toronto's expenditures
Attached is a status report on the $149.6 million allocated to the Y2K project to remedy all Priority 1 business functions.
As of June 30, 1999, a total of $52.9 million has been committed or spent leaving $96.7. For June 1999, $5.6 million have
been committed. The majority of this expenditure is again for resources, hardware, software, servers, and network
equipment. Contingency Planning and change requests for critical 2 and 3 will be approved on an individual basis and
money will be drawn from the administration funds allocated to each department first, then from the Project Contingency
Fund. Additional funding will be requested to Council only after these funds have been depleted. (See Appendix 4).
Change requests
Community & Neighborhood Services
147 - Remediate Animal Services' systems ($21,600)
Approval to begin work on this priority 2 system was give. No additional funds were required as this is to be covered under
the Departmental Administration budget.
Economic Development, Culture & Tourism
136 - Advance full implementation of the CLASS system to September 1999 ($2,996,495)
This change request was approved in principal by the Year 2000 Steering Committee. The Steering Committee has
requested detailed workplan information to ensure that all implementation risks are mitigated. This information will be
brought forward at the next Steering Committee meeting, but work has been initiated to ensure that critical timelines can be
achieved.
Conclusion:
The City of Toronto's Year 2000 readiness program is moving forward as anticipated. Council will continue to receive
progress reports as requested.
Michael Garrett
Chief Administrative Officer
Acting Commissioner Corporate Services
Contact:
Lana Viinamae, Director Year 2000
