Letter to the Editor

The Navy Marine Corps Intranet is one of the biggest experiments in how not to award an IT contract and then try to make it work.

Electronic Data Systems Corp. has bitten off more than it can chew and it knows it. The setting is the worst possible for experimenting in, as it is a Research, Development, Test and Evaluation environment at several naval facilities across the United States. The sites are connected via T-1 and T-3 links with multiprotocol operations, plus high-speed connection to the Internet. EDS' answer: TCP/IP only and no Internet connectivity.

Boy, did that go over like a lead balloon with the RDT&E communications.

The grand plan was that everyone would use the same computer platform, with the same core software, and they can all be monitored remotely. That is something that every big company would love to see happen. But before you do this, you would want to conduct an inventory to determine what kinds of machines would be needed be replaced.

Oops — what about the Hewlett-Packard users, Sun users and the few thousand Mac users? Gee, forgot to ask how their professional tools would port over to an Intel platform with Windows 2000. What security problems?

Check out the rosy picture at nmci.navair.navy.mil.

Name withheld upon request