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thedrifter
04-09-07, 09:21 AM
Officials say NMCI difficulties are rooted in design
By Mark A. Kellner - Staff writer
Posted : April 16, 2007

The Defense Department’s top two information technology leaders — Assistant Defense Secretary John Grimes and Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Croom, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency — conceded that the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet still has troubles.

The intranet, known as NMCI, was cited during a March 28 hearing of the House Armed Services terrorism, unconventional threats and capabilities subcommittee.

Under questioning by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the subcommittee chairman, about “what have we learned” from the implementation of NMCI, Grimes said a lack of user participation in the design of the network, which connects thousands of Navy and Marine Corps users worldwide, was a problem.

“What I’ve found over the past year in this job, out visiting, was that the user was not brought in when they were developing the system,” he said. “When the system was delivered, they never anticipated the number of applications that they would have to run.”

It was believed the contractor would encounter 5,000 computer applications, he said, but the number mushroomed to 14,000 to 15,000. Grimes also said the “front-end work wasn’t very well-documented,” which led to contractor EDS having a problem “selling seats” on the NMCI network, where it expected to make money.

At the same time, Grimes said, “I think part of it was the way we stated the requirements” of the NMCI acquisition. The Navy “had not addressed the interface with the classified networks, which Navy has to get back to — [and it] hasn’t been totally fixed.”

Croom said that while it was “easy to Monday-morning quarterback” a project as vast as NMCI, a way to avoid future problems is to “chop that problem up into smaller chunks, prototype and test [it] before delivering larger chunks.”

The NMCI discussion was part of a cordial, if not genial, 90-minute session in which the subcommittee ostensibly weighed the DoD’s $31.5 billion 2008 IT budget. However, while there was some pointed questioning on aspects of IT acquisitions and network security, Smith and the other subcommittee members appeared united in their approval of the Pentagon’s IT activities.

“I do believe you gentlemen are doing a very good job,” Smith said at the conclusion of the hearing, though he had earlier said the department must “coordinate these investments to make sure the systems are interoperable, that we are not duplicating other investments and that we have streamlined systems that will not require overly burdensome maintenance over the long term.”

Asked by Smith if there were ways to help empower DoD to streamline IT purchases, neither defense official asked for legislative help.

Instead, Croom pointed to his “adopt-before-we-buy” and “buy-before-we-create” concepts as ways to meet needs.

“If another [DoD] organization has developed or acquired a capability or service that either fits or is close to fitting a need we have, we adopt it,” Croom said.

“We look at everything from an enterprise [perspective],” Grimes added. “General Croom’s focus is on things that will function in a joint [services] environment.”

This means that the systems agency tests items the services wish to attach to the network, since “anybody in the joint arena that wants to get on our networks has to be certified,” he added.

Ellie