In conducting our review, we assessed the Army’s Year 2000 efforts against our Year 2000 Assessment Guide. This guide addresses common issues affecting most federal agencies and presents a structured approach and a checklist to aid in planning, managing, and evaluating Year 2000 programs. The guidance, which is consistent with the DOD Year 2000 Management Plan and the Army’s own Year 2000 guidance, describes five phases—supported by program and project management activities—with each phase representing a major Year 2000 program activity or segment. The guide draws heavily on the work of the CIO Council Subcommittee on Year 2000, and incorporates guidance and practices identified by leading organizations in the information technology industry. The phases and a description of each phase follows. Awareness—Define the Year 2000 problem and gain executive-level support and sponsorship. Establish a Year 2000 program team and develop an overall strategy. Ensure that everyone in the organization is fully aware of the issue. Assessment—Assess the Year 2000 impact on the enterprise. Identify core business areas and processes, inventory and analyze systems supporting the core business areas, and prioritize their conversion or replacement. Develop contingency plans to handle data exchange issues, lack of data, and bad data. Identify and secure the necessary resources. Renovation—Convert, replace, or eliminate selected platforms, applications, databases, and utilities. Modify interfaces. Validation—Test, verify, and validate converted or replaced platforms, applications, databases, and utilities. Test the performance, functionality, and integration of converted or replaced platforms, applications, databases, utilities, and interfaces in an operational environment. Implementation—Implement converted or replaced platforms, applications, databases, utilities, and interfaces. Implement data exchange contingency plans, if necessary. To determine the status of the Army’s Year 2000 program and the appropriateness of its strategy and actions for ensuring successful completion, we evaluated DOD’s Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (OASD/C3I) efforts to provide Year 2000 support to the Army. We also evaluated the efforts of the Army’s Office of the Director of Information Systems, Command, Control, Communications, and Computers (DISC4) to manage and oversee Army components’ correction of the Year 2000 problem. The DISC4 Director also serves as the Army CIO. Specifically, we obtained and reviewed from these offices pertinent Year 2000 guidance, project and funding documentation, and date format requirements. In addition, we reviewed the U.S. Army Project Change of Century Action Plan to assess the level of guidance, roles, and responsibilities and target milestone dates for the Year 2000 effort. Further, we met with Army officials and analyzed their efforts to address the Year 2000 problem at the Army Materiel Command (AMC)—one of the Army’s 17 major commands. We also obtained a copy of the Army’s October 1997 Year 2000 inventory database to evaluate its accuracy, reliability, and usefulness. The Army relies on this database to monitor Year 2000 progress and as the source of Army information input to the Defense Integration Support Tools. We also reviewed segments of the Year 2000 database that AMC uses to manage its Year 2000 program. However, because the results of limited data testing showed that these Army databases were incomplete and inaccurate, we could not and did not rely on the data to validate Year 2000 costs or the numbers of systems reported as being in each Year 2000 phase. We also obtained a copy of the U.S. Army Year 2000 Database User’s Manual and discussed the specifics of database use and effectiveness with Army officials. In addition, we met with officials from the Logistics Systems Support Center (LSSC), an Army central design activity with responsibility for maintaining the software for the Commodity Command Standard System (CCSS)—a large standard automated information system—to determine whether LSSC officials were receiving Year 2000 guidance and other related requirements issued by the OASD/C3I and the Army’s DISC4. We also discussed with LSSC officials their progress and challenges they face in solving the Year 2000 problem. Further, we compared the information they maintained on their efforts with the information DISC4 and AMC are maintaining for oversight purposes. Lastly, we obtained and analyzed Army and AMC data to gain an understanding of the size, complexity, and diversity of the Army’s Year 2000 organizational structure. To help ensure that we were not duplicating other audit agency work, we met with officials of AAA and the Army Inspector General to determine the objectives and scope of their reviews of the Army’s Year 2000 problem. We also discussed preliminary results of work performed on the Army’s Year 2000 inventory database with AAA officials. We conducted our work primarily at the Army’s DISC4 office in Fairfax, Virginia; AMC Headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia; and LSSC in St. Louis, Missouri. Our work was performed from November 1996 through February 1998 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. This work builds upon information included in a series of DOD component-level Year 2000 reports that have already been issued, including a related report on the Army LSSC. We requested and received written comments on a draft of this report from the Chief Information Officer of the Department of the Army. These comments are discussed in the “Agency Comments and Our Evaluation” section and are reprinted in appendix II. Many of the Army’s automated information systems and embedded weapons systems are vulnerable to the Year 2000 problem, which is rooted in the way dates are recorded and computed in automated information systems. For the past several decades, systems have typically used two digits to represent the year, such as “97” representing 1997, in order to conserve electronic data storage and reduce operating costs. However, with this two-digit format, the year 2000 is indistinguishable from 1900, as is 2001 indistinguishable from 1901. As a result of this ambiguity, system or application programs that use dates to perform calculations, comparisons, or sorting may generate incorrect results when working with years after 1999. Should the Army’s computer systems fail on the morning of the Year 2000, Army operations at all levels could be impacted by the incorrect processing of data, as well as corrupted databases, or even massive system failures. In turn, this could result in such problems as weapons systems failures, delays in supply shipments, faulty inventory forecasts, unreliable budget estimates, and erroneous personnel-related information. The problem could also lead to a degradation of the Army’s ability to maintain a readiness posture by seriously slowing or curtailing its ability to sustain the warfighters’ vital supplies and information. Like the other military services, the Army has adopted the DOD Year 2000 management strategy, which calls for centralized oversight with decentralized execution of Year 2000 corrective actions. The strategy also adopts DOD’s five-phased management approach for addressing the Year 2000 problem. The Army has assigned responsibility to DISC4 for overseeing the Year 2000 effort and has charged it with facilitating the sharing of information and best practices and with monitoring Army Year 2000 progress. DISC4 is the Army’s primary information resources manager and its director also serves as the Army’s CIO. As of October 1997, the Army Year 2000 Project Office had eight staff to oversee the Army’s Year 2000 program. Appendix I shows the Army’s Year 2000 organizational structure and depicts the complexity and diversity of the Year 2000 program. It also provides an example of the magnitude of the Year 2000 effort at a major command level. The Army began its Year 2000 program in December 1995 by establishing a Year 2000 Project Office. Although an official charter was never formulated, the Army Year 2000 Project Office was tasked with broad responsibility for providing centralized oversight and management of the Army’s Year 2000 effort. In March 1996, the Army approved an initial U.S. Army Project Change of Century Action Plan. This plan, which was revised in October 1996, formalized the Project Office’s responsibilities, which include establishing Army-wide strategies and guidance for addressing the Year overseeing Army-wide Year 2000 planning and monitoring progress; representing the Army in Year 2000 discussions with DOD and other developing a strategy for Army Year 2000 cross-functional resource directing the establishment of Year 2000 emergency response teams trained and capable of rapidly responding to and assisting with critical operational systems that fail due to Year 2000 problems; chairing an Army Year 2000 Working Group to (1) investigate Year 2000 and cross-functional issues, (2) avoid duplication of effort, (3) identify and share lessons learned, and (4) provide recommendations for Army-wide improvement; and establishing and maintaining Army Year 2000 home pages (public and restricted) that contain the Army Year 2000 systems database and serve as a clearinghouse for Year 2000 information. At the time of our review, the Army Year 2000 Project Office had already met many Year 2000 challenges. For example, the Project Office had (1) developed an extensive Year 2000 plan that specified tasks, goals, and milestones for each phase of Year 2000 corrective actions, (2) established roles and responsibilities for performing the specified tasks, (3) provided guidance to components for estimating Year 2000 costs, and (4) published Year 2000 certification requirements. The Year 2000 plan was updated in October 1996 and revised in January 1998. The Project Office had conducted six Army-wide data calls to accumulate important Year 2000 information from its components. Early in the awareness phase, it had also established a baseline system inventory that was used to develop and populate the Army’s current Year 2000 system inventory database. The Project Office’s establishment of an Army Year 2000 home page enables Army components to access systems inventory information. Throughout the effort, the Project Office has maintained its Year 2000 awareness campaign and has emphasized to Army organizations the need to report Year 2000 information. In early 1997, the Army took several actions to minimize the adverse impact of the Year 2000 problem. The Army’s CIO requested that AAA help evaluate component needs and identify areas that could cause Year 2000 failures.