Gadgetopia

Smooth Sailing Eludes NMCI: You think your intranet is complicated? The Navy and Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) project is three years old and has a budget of $3 billion. It was awarded to EDS of Plano, Texas. Here’s how it’s going…

“Complicating the work has been the unexpected discovery of more than 100,000 applications, some of them decades old, rogue tools installed by users and being used to communicate and run important day-to-day Navy business.

Old applications in nearly one-quarter of the seats cannot be transferred to new Windows 2000 machines, forcing EDS to install, in NMCI parlance, ‘dual desktops,’ leaving sailors and Marines with two PCs on their desks. The Navy and EDS have narrowed the number of applications in use to 35,000 thus far, but the pair still has more application rationalization ahead before the migration of those that make the final cut can begin.”