Psychopathic IT projects: a five-point checklist

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The Biggest Psychopathic IT Project... NMCI

If you are not familiar with all of EDS's work, NMCI is the military-contracted Navy and Marine Corps Intranet commissioned by the Department of the Navy and built by EDS and ISF. I have had the unique pleasure of being involved in the deployment of the NMCI from prior service in the Navy.

I was an IT in the Navy (enlisted), and I have worked very closely with EDS and NMCI representatives for about three years. In my position, I was constantly working with them to support about 300 users that fell to my responsibility. I was involved in the deployment of the network at my unit, and it was certainly disruptive of normal operations. It took nearly three months for all of our users to regain the proper access to the necessary resources. There were many times that the poor design of the system left the entire unit dysfunctional for hours - which in the military is completely unacceptable.

It is an incredibly slow, bloated, and overambitious network. The idea is to provide centralized and mobile information systems, uniformity from base-to-base, ease of Navy-wide communications, etc. NMCI was to provide a secondary classified network as robust as the unclassified network. It was also intended to support Naval Messaging systems like the Defense Message System (DMS).

The classified network has been slow to deploy due to constantly changing requirements and poor coordination amongst sites. DMS integration will probably never happen because of deeply rooted design flaws. User support is absolutely horrible. There have been instances where I have spent four hours on the phone with the NMCI HelpDesk to help a user get his password reset. A service ticket I submitted to fix the replication schedule for an Exchange Public Folder took over a MONTH to have resolved, and it wasn't for complexity - it was because no one at the second tier of the support system knew who to escalate the issue to.

Additionally, the Navy needs to be able to take shore-based units such as aircraft squadrons and move them - with their information system - to mobile platforms like aircraft carriers. Deployment of NMCI seats, as the procedure is called, is a major evolution that may require a unit to go offline and cease or draw down operations days earlier than entirely necessary.

Not to mention the workstations and software package are all outdated and underpowered. It is nearly impossible to get a simple software package certified for installation because the approval process is so long and overblown that it takes longer than the lifecycle of product versions to get a product approved.

NMCI sucks. The Psycopathic part is in the price tag. NMCI's 10 year contract, which will expire in 2010 in favor of a new network to follow, is costing the Navy $10 billion.

Posted by: tpettyrox   Posted on: 10/21/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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