forced to go to, but it is something that also will increase the operational efficiency of the Senate.

Just to let you know the magnitude of this project, over a number of years it will be, we estimate, about $30 million to go completely to digital, and that includes lots of peripheral things, not just the machines and that sort of thing.

The second part of that $4.4 million is $2.1 million for robotic cameras in committee rooms. As you know, four of our committees already have robotic cameras that are operated from a central console over in the recording studio, and they are very unobtrusive. They are also much better for security purposes.

We now have seven committees that have taken a liking to this, and have requested robotics, so we have put into the budget for this year $2.1 million that will be used to equip four of the committees and it is not that we are trying to discriminate. That is about the limit of what we can get done in the fiscal year, because it is not just putting the camera up in the corner. It is actually creating a console room or a console area so that it can be controlled from there.

Those decisions are going to be made in consultation with you folks and with Rules. We are proposing that the committees with the greatest demand for the service have priority, but that is certainly up to you and the Rules Committee. We will do what you think is best.

We also, as I mentioned, have $1.1 million for the commercial information service upgrade. I have addressed that.

Another item that I do not think you would find anybody in the Senate that would disagree with, and that is, we have $1 million in here for a new E-mail system. In the 4 months I have been around, the E-mail system has been an interesting challenge at times. What we are facing here is that cc:Mail, which is produced by Lotus, is no longer going to be supported, and it is no longer going to be upgraded, and so basically they are abandoning cc:Mail, and consequently we are going to have to abandon cc:Mail. So we are in the process of coming up with a new system that will be more efficient for the Senate.

We also have in here $1.9 million for training, for human resources upgrade, and for contract management. Contract management is of particular interest to me, Senator, having come from a place where we did do a lot of out-sourcing, if you will. I think the Senate does not do as good a job as it should in overseeing the many vendors that we have here in everything from negotiating the contracts to managing the contracts to overseeing, making sure that we get deliverables from those contracts, and the quality that we need. I have been looking into that, and we want to upgrade the contract management side of the business. That is where some of these personnel are involved.

And then finally we have $2.4 million for COLA's and merit increases, as I mentioned earlier.

We recognize that this is a sizeable increase in our budget, but I think that you can see that these expenditures will, when they are made, and these systems are put into effect, increase the operational capabilities of the Senate. We sure hope you will support this budget request.

54-224 99-10

I would like to turn to Y2K, and I know you have been waiting for me to get there. Let me give you my personal overview. I am highly confident, not just confident, I am highly confident that the Senate's mission-critical systems are going to be fully capable of dealing with the Y2K problem when we hit January 1, 2000, that we are going to be in good shape.

When I first got here I got involved in looking at our process and where we were and that sort of thing. I had to put that aside in terms of the intensity of interest during the impeachment trial. But as soon as it was over, I got back into it, and I can assure you, that progress continued during the impeachment trial. Our folks were doing their jobs very well.

But I got back into it as soon as impeachment was over at a personal level and even went to the point of personally having our process validated, and I will explain that to you sometime if you are interested. I feel very comfortable we are doing the right things to get there.

Our effort, as you know, started in 1996, but we really did not get started in an organized way until 1998, when the Project Office was put together.

Probably the two most important things that we did, it would appear to me: one was to bring GAO in and to adopt their five-phased approach to it-awareness, assessment, renovation, validation, and implementation-and we have been following that format very carefully, and GAO has been a partner in this. They are looking at what we are doing.

I actually had them come in and talk to me independent of the folks in Postal Square, just making sure that I was comfortable that we were doing the right things, and that they were comfortable.

The other thing that we have done that I think is very important is that we have hired Mitretek to be a partner to help us manage this process. I am—and you will find, Senator, I am a skeptic somewhat of outside consultants. I have never felt like you consistently get your money's worth from outside consultants, and so I will always be a little bit skeptical, but this is one where I feel very good about the value-added of having Mitretek here and am very confident that their presence is a very big plus for us.

The whole Y2K thing I think has been a blessing in disguise for the Senate for the simple reason that it forced or allowed the Senate to modernize its technological infrastructure, and I think it has forced us to do it in a lot of ways.

Our approach has been not dissimilar to the approach that a lot of Government agencies and other institutions have taken in terms of how we approach this issue, and that is to define the missioncritical systems and the non-mission-critical systems. With respect to the Senate, we had a three-pronged criteria based upon the business functions of the Senate.

One was legislation; it is obviously the business we are in. We are in the business of constituent service, and we are required to provide financial management in order to make the system work. So we use that criteria to define what was mission-critical. Initially we came up with 19 mission-critical systems, and since I have gotten here, we have gone through the process and have added three more systems that I think probably needed to be on the list. We now have 22 mission critical systems.

We have non-mission critical systems that we have defined, and there are 43 of those, and those 43 were based upon whether or not the Senate could continue to function if those systems did not function. Now, we might not function well, and it might not be real pleasant to function without some of this stuff if we went back to hand ledgers, but the fact is, the Senate could continue to function, and so we used that as the criteria, and there are 43 of those.