АҚШ Әскери-теңіз күштерінің желілік инфрақұрылымы: NMCI бағдарламасы

The Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) is a United States Department of the Navy program which was designed to provide the vast majority of information technology services for the entire Department, including the United States Navy and Marine Corps.

The largest internal computer network in the world, NMCI served more than 707,000 sailors, marines, and civilians in 620 locations across the continental United States, Hawaii, and Japan as of March 2008. The network's 4,100 servers handle over 2.3 petabytes of data. NMCI established an interoperable command and control network that provides the IT platform necessary for transitioning to a net centric environment. Acting Department of Defense (DoD) CIO Terry Halvorsen described NMCI as a "forcing function within the DON to attend to our legacy infrastructure of applications, servers and networks.”
While recent statements by the Navy have been very positive about NMCI, a 2007 survey of users reported it unstable, slow, and frustrating. "NMCI has been a hugely successful program for the Navy," Weller said during a press briefing with reporters [14 October 2010]. "It has been a cost effective way to deliver unprecedented level of service. We learned a lot about how to do it and how not to do it." "Anytime you transition from where you have a high degree of localized control to a high degree of centralized control, there will be some disgruntled folks," Weller said. "I think since we already are in that world, about 70 percent of the Navy's IT infrastructure, we are in a world where the Navy has complete control and authority over how we operate the network. That has allowed us to maintain extremely high degree of security, which is frankly our number one issue. The only way that we are aware of you can do that is to have tight configuration management and tight central control. So that is where a lot of the complaints came from. To that note, what have we done to lessen blow in future? I think the answer is we don't need to because we are already there." This is a paradigm shift because under the original NMCI contract, the government managed the network at a distance and did not own any IT assets used in the program. Rather, they were 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, remote access from mobile devices, etc.) did apply. Videophones that provide equal access for Deaf employees are not permissible under NMCI regulations. As of October 2007, the per seat price for all of NMCI was reduced by 15 percent. Desktop PCs and laptops as well as other network components are being continually upgraded in order to enhance performance and security. The NMCI program is managed by the Navy's Program Executive Office–Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS).

On 31 March 2009, the Department of the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare System Command announced its intention to negotiate a Continuity of Service Contract (COSC) that would allow HP to continue to provide IT services during the transition from the existing contract (NMCI) to the proposed next contract, known as Next Generation Enterprise Network Solution (NGEN). Under the new contract, HP will continue NMCI services, support the transition to NGEN (which includes various engineering services), and give the Navy licenses for the network's operations and infrastructure. A chief goal of the new contract is to ensure that the network remains up and running while the Navy pursues the goals of NGEN. As Rear Admiral John Goodwin, assistant chief of naval operations of NGEN notes, "My responsibilities are to synchronize the efforts of the operations, the policy, the programming, the resources and the acquisition piece," Goodwin said.

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. Disgruntled users nicknamed NMCI "No More Contracted Infosystems," according to an article in the Marine Corps Times. Some users also complain that they are not able to access all the Web sites they want, like box. net and npr. org. Senior officers said they enacted the worldwide ban on these types of sites out of concern that the rapidly increasing use of these sites threatened to overwhelm the military's private Internet network and risk the disclosure of combat sensitive material. NMCI's (per DoD requirements) need for security results in longer boot up times for computers on the network than on non network computers. HP claims to be 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 HP's 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, users are not given permissions to change computers’ settings. Some servicemen 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. The U. S. Naval Institute reports that "Complaints about NMCI speed and reliability are near constant" and a wired. com piece quotes an NMCI employee as saying:

"I still work for the NMCI and I have to say that I honestly have a hard time looking sailors in the eye when I’m out and about because I’m so ashamed of the job that’s done. I’ve never seen more disregard for the well being of a customer than I have at HP. We’re given sub standard tools and people that are hired off the street that have NO computer knowledge. There is absolutely no incentive or upward advancement, and on top of that, there have been pay cuts since HP took over. They aren’t retaining any talented individuals, and it shows. We’re understaffed. We were working mandatory overtime for almost a year (10 11 months). Now that’s been eliminated since it’s no longer cost effective to care about the users for the remainder of this contract seeing as how the new contract has been signed and made official Stretched for resources as they are, people like me are pulled from their normal duties (dealing with customer issues, training agents, and completing order requests) to just answer basic Service Desk calls. When this happens, we worsen our situation because there’s a major loss in training and resolution time. Agents that I know that have been resourced to working e mail backlog have said that there is a 15 day turnaround time for nothing more than a response back We’re digging ourselves into a hole that we can’t possibly hope to get out of ethically, and I shudder to think of what it’s going to take to even restore ourselves back to the position of a semi effective source of troubleshooting and support for our customers." Additionally, a govinfo. gov article mentions several perceived NMCI inadequacies, e. g. "NMCI response time is slow both on and off site" and " 'reach back' to legacy systems through NMCI is slow, sometimes taking 45 minutes to open a document." It was reported that NMCI was breached by Iranian cyber warfare efforts. NMCI's performance and reliability has been criticized by its user base, as evidenced by sailors and marines initially claiming that the acronym stood for “No More Computer Information.”

In terms of transparency relating to NMCI's user satisfaction surveys, unofficial US government IT news site gcn. com reports "Since the surveys began a few years ago, the NMCI program office has steadfastly declined to release a complete copy of the questionnaire, instead just issuing a release about the results."