Navy/Marine Corps Intranet

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The Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) is a United States Department of the Navy outsourcing program, in which an outside contractor provides a vast majority of information technology services for the entire Department, including the United States Navy and Marine Corps.

1 Overview
2 History
3 Network Security, Functionality vs. Users’ Permissions, Expectations
4 Notes and references
5 External links

[edit] Overview

As of March 2008, NMCI included more than 351,000 computers, serving more than 707,000 Sailors, Marines and civilians in 620 locations in the continental United States, Hawaii, and Japan, making it the largest internal computer network in the world^[1].

NMCI established an interoperable command and control network that provides the IT platform necessary for transitioning to a net-centric environment.^[2] Department of the Navy CIO Robert J. Carey described NMCI as a “forcing function within the DON to attend to our legacy infrastructure of applications, servers and networks.^[3]”

Unlike other methods of outsourcing, which typically revolve around staffing, under NMCI, the government does not own any IT assets used in the program.^[4] Rather, they are owned by the prime contractor, and services are provided to the government on a per-seat basis. Pricing is primarily assessed on a per-machine basis that includes security services, help desk support, and periodic technology upgrades; however, fees for additional services (such as classified connectivity, mission-critical service, additional user accounts, software installation, seat moves, BlackBerry access, etc.) do apply.

It is the first large-scale (and, as of March 2008, still the largest) federal government IT centralization and outsourcing project. Its lessons have informed other government agency efforts to consolidate and outsource IT services. According to industry analyst Warren Suss of Suss consulting, “In the long run, government agencies will come to see the need for similar types of solutions, and I think they’ll look to NMCI for lessons learned.”^[5]

The NMCI program is managed by the Navy's Program Executive Office–Enterprise Information Systems (PEO-EIS), which is directed, as of May 2007, by Rear Admiral (lower half) Timothy V. "Tim" Flynn, III.

[edit] History

On October 6, 2000, the NMCI contract was awarded to Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Secretary of the Navy Gordon England summed up the Navy’s IT Environment prior to the commencement of NMCI: “We basically had 28 separate commands budgeting, developing, licensing, and operating IT autonomously. It was inefficient and from the larger Department perspective, produced results that were far from optimal.” ^[6]

NMCI consolidated roughly 6,000 networks—some of which could not e-mail, let alone collaborate with each other—into a single integrated and secure IT environment. EDS updated more than 100,000 desktop and laptop PCs in 2007.^[7] The program also consolidated an ad hoc network of more than 8,000 applications to 500 in four years and 15,003 logistics and readiness systems to 2,759 over a two-year period.^[8]

Sub-contractors to EDS include:

Harris Corporation (which acquired Multimax formerly known as Netco Government Services and WAM!NET), which provides enterprise network infrastructure design and support.
Verizon, which provides wide area network (WAN) connectivity.

EDS also provides the security services once provided by Raytheon.

EDS also has worked with more than 400 small businesses, with 5 percent for small disadvantaged businesses, 5 percent for women-owned small businesses and 1.5 percent for HUB Zone small businesses. Since its inception, NMCI has exceeded the minimum 40% small business objective set for the contract.^[9]

NMCI quickly suffered some widely publicized setbacks, including rollout delays that caused EDS financial losses.^[10]

Work in 2008 has increased NMCI’s ability to respond to security issues and the program was the first network to implement fully the Department of Defense information assurance standards in both classified and unclassified environments.

The Navy and EDS measure end user satisfaction through a series of quarterly satisfaction surveys. End user satisfaction has steadily improved, reaching a high of nearly 86% in February 2008, as compared to 80% in December 2006. This is largely due to the upgrade of nearly 112,000 desktop and laptop computers in 2007, and a combination of network enhancements that are improving speed and reliability. EDS is on track to upgrade another 120,000 seats in 2008 at Navy and Marine Corps bases in the US and Asia.^[11]

In 2006, the NMCI program office was criticized for its annual customer-satisfaction surveys. Officials refuse to release the raw data, leading to accusations that their conclusions are overly sunny. One NMCI director, Rear Admiral James B. Godwin III, said releasing the results would challenge the "integrity of our data."

An example DoD CAC

The Department of the Navy has shown no desire to scale back or cancel the program. On 24 March 2006 the Navy exercised its three-year, $3 billion option to extend the contract through September 2010^[1].

In April 2006, users began to logon with Common Access Cards (CACs), a smartcard-based logon system called the Cryptographic Log On (CLO).^[12]

The program has been less than fully successful and is being scrutinized as the end of contract approaches in 2010. In an interview the DoN CIO Robert J. Carey stated, “The plan is that NGEN <Next Generation Enterprise Network > will be in place before the NMCI contract expires because it is not a renewable contract. By October 2010, NGEN has to be operational and running smoothly because so much of the Department’s mission is fully embedded in IT processes and networks.” The successes and challenges are best read in the GAO’s report of December 2006. The report states that “ NMCI has not met its two strategic goals—to provide information superiority and to foster innovation via interoperability and shared services.” The document also goes on to evaluate EDS’s performance, "GAO’s analysis of available performance data, however, showed that the Navy had met only 3 of 20 performance targets (15 percent) associated with the program’s goals and nine related performance categories."

There are, however, other viewpoints. John Lussier, Department of the Navy deputy chief information officer, told Military Information Technology Magazine "I personally think NMCI has been a huge success and that it is unparalleled from a security perspective." Lussier attributed NMCI's success to its affordability, performance, schedule and security capabilities.^[13]

NMCI works today and it continues to improve as user needs evolve and technology opportunities arise. Technology initiatives planned for final two years of NMCI include new hardware, applications, and services to support the Navy and Marine Corps’ advanced IT needs. EDS will install more than 110,000 new laptops and desktops, and will push more upgrades to improve end-users’ IT capabilities through upgraded machine capacity, new operating systems, and new service lines.^[14]

[edit] Network Security, Functionality vs. Users’ Permissions, Expectations

In November, 2007, a quarterly user satisfaction rating between both the United States Marine Corps. and the United States Navy revealed that 83.8 percent of the military members who submitted the survey said that NMCI was satisfactory. Some of the 17 percent who were not satisfied were vocal in their disapproval. EDS depends on their comments to enhance NMCI, and the intent of the surveys has always been to pinpoint specific areas in need of improvement.

Disgruntled users nicknamed NMCI “No More Contracted Infosystems,” according to an article in the Marine Corps Times^[15]. Some users also complain that they are not able to access all the Web sites they want, like MySpace and YouTube. This complaint is not isolated to NMCI. Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman, points out that "These actions were taken to enhance and increase network security and protect the use of the bandwidth,"^[16] and the measures applied on the NMCI network are in line with the DoD’s official policy^[17].

NMCI’s need for the tightest security results in longer boot up times for computers on the network than on non-network computers. EDS is accelerating its technology refresh activities which include deploying new, faster computers which should improve performance while maintaining tight security.

Though technical support has improved dramatically, and though EDS’ help desk earned high praise from many survey respondents in 2007, some NMCI users felt that their wait times were excessive when they called the help desk. Further, because NMCI’s first priority was to rein in the counterproductive customization and proliferation of applications and networks^[18], users are not given permissions to change computers’ settings. Some service men and women are unhappy with the fact that they are not given permission to administer the system from the user level.

NMCI requires that only network administrators perform all maintenance and support to ensure uniform security and capabilities across the network. Some users find that requirement cumbersome and claim that wait times to resolve even the smallest of issues are too long^[19].

Despite early challenges, NMCI has become the foundation on which the Navy and Marine Corps can build to support their broader strategic information management objectives^[20] and transition fully to network-centric warfare.