Well the Navy will be closing the contract it has held with the Navy and Marine Corps Intranet in 2010. Though the contract is not renewable, the Navy is looking more into bringing back the IT field to the Navy. For those who don’t know, NMCI is completely outsourcing of everything IT i.e. non-DoN civilian contractors. The Department of the Navy CIO Robert Carey views NMCI as “forcing function within the DON to attend to our legacy infrastructure of applications, servers and networks.” Unfortunately, the rest of the Navy has opposing views.
The next move for the Navy is to begin its Next Generation Enterprise Network “NGEN” and have it up and running before the contract expires. The Navy hopes to buy all of the equipment that NMCI purchased in order to keep things running smoothly instead of buying everything over again. What I can benefit most from this is the fact that more jobs could open up as far as shore duty goes.
Because of all the outsourcing that has happened since NMCI, the IT rating has suffered when it comes to ADP due to all the civilians that do the majority of the work. Albeit surveys say that overall NMCI has done a good job overall, big Navy says that out of three major goals only one of them was met. Because of this, the Navy was only capable of completing 3 of 20 performance targets.
Hopefully NGEN will provide more hands on experience when it comes to networking because sailors are limited in what they can do. Having to call someone overseas because I have no options left to go to as far as troubleshooting only slows down the process of getting a network back up. Obviously we can’t get into reloading a LAN because one of the servers experiences constant outages, but getting some sort of training into network specifics could also cut down on Navy’s spending in hiring outside help to get the job done. Then with that few people trained up, it can be passed on to those who have little experience in networking and get them trained up. No one can know everything when it comes to networking, but the Navy can at least get more sailors trained up so it can be passed on. The Japanese lost World War II because they sent in there best and most knowledgeable pilots and sailors out to the front lines while the US had those senior personnel train younger sailors so if a senior sailor went down, the young one could pick up where he left off. For the most part we still carry on that kind of training, but not as much in the IT field.
My biggest problem is that I can’t learn from anything unless I see it done. Hands on is my strongest point in learning anything new and always has been. The time it takes for me to search for errors experienced in a network exceeds the time it would take to correct it if someone who has seen the error before shows me how to fix it.
NMCI has got the Navy on a good start with an updated and consolidated network, now it’s time for us to take what they’ve done and build on it. Start training the Navy, and not just DoN contractors, on how to keep networks rolling without having to outsource.