IIt's 10 a.m. on Jan. 1. I've been watching the status display from the International Y2K Cooperation Center (www.iy2kcc.org) since noon yesterday. Except for a "Condition Yellow" situation in Gambia (GNP per capita of less than $1,000; 46% of population of 1.3 million is under the age of 14; there are fewer than 11,000 telephones), all status boxes show up as solid green "O.K." indicators.

A reason for grateful relief and for rejoicing? No.

How we spent unaccounted for hundreds of billions of dollars to purchase the global "Condition Green" status everywhere will be remembered in years to come as a monumental failure in risk management. The hysterical ways of how Y2K programs were launched, financed and implemented are dismal tales of how not to master information technologies. Here are the principal culprits:

1. The Insurance Industry. All technological innovations have been risky and will continue to be. In due course, the insurance providers have always found a solution of how to attribute costs to risks and how to balance them by means of economical tradeoffs. In this way, nobody had to become an expert in risk assessment and face uncertainty alone.

   Insurance coverage made it possible to pool similar risks and make the enjoyment of the benefits of a technologically advanced society feasible. You can buy insurance policies for earthquakes, tornadoes, oil spills, satellite launches and old age. There's a competitive global market in risk underwriting. There are experienced risk assessors whose job is to come up with premiums that reflect the probabilities of failure. They also promote standards that would help make their guesswork result in profitable businesses.

   The failure of the insurance industry to assess and then underwrite software risks is the reason why management concluded three years ago that it had no way of evaluating their potential losses from Y2K. Executives thus ended up in negotiations that were closer to how they rescue hostages from hijackers instead of how they make informed business decisions.

2. The Software Industry. The persistent denial by this industry's most-influential leaders to explain the characteristics of software risks will remain a testimonial of their contemptuous neglect. The software experts were best qualified to understand and explain the inherent fault characteristics of all software and how computer users learned how to cope with that for more than 50 years without catastrophic disasters. The software experts didn't do what one could expect from trusted professionals in carrying the message to the public and the decision-making executives. Instead, efforts were concentrated either on making money from the Y2K scare, or how to avoid blame when litigation takes place. To compound this arrogance, it was this leadership that has pushed through federal legislation that would further absolve them from accountability for negligence. If this is how the privileged leadership behaved in the case of Y2K, how will the general public trust them as new risks emerge down the road?

3. The Panderers. This includes an assortment of academics, authors, lecturers and consultants who offered "doomsday" prophecies of monumental Y2K disasters without offering a shred of analytically supported evidence to help support their claims. In effect, they diverted perhaps as much as 50% of the annual budget for software innovation (over a period of several years) without any rationale that would compare the costs with the risks. Instead of an economically well-reasoned approach, money had to be spent to exorcise irrational anxieties, thus magnifying the already bad reputation of IT as a fiscally irresponsible and unaccountable corporate activity. To compound this malfeasance, these promoters continued to attribute Y2K problems to spontaneous "bugs" and the allegedly excessive costs of magnetic storage as a way of setting the stage for absolving everyone from any possible blame.

Of course I'm pleased that we didn't have a nuclear plant meltdown, launch World War III or doom most of civilization to shiver through wintry evenings in rooms lit and heated only with kerosene lamps. Some of us recognize that the veneer of civilization is very thin and can break easily. But the conduct of our leadership in managing the first major crisis of the information age doesn't fill me with the pride of a major accomplishment in harnessing the enormous powers of computing for the benefit of the people who must depend on it. The experience of how we got to a fault-free Jan. 1 doesn't offer a viable precedent of how to prepare for the more difficult computer-age challenges that are to come.