Personnel system set for NMCI

EDS, the contractor with the task of building and managing the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, will announce today that the Navy's personnel system will soon make the transition to NMCI.

The Navy has been deploying the Navy Standard Integrated Personnel System (NSIPS), which eventually will replace four legacy personnel and pay systems and provide one system for active and reserve sailors. The goal of NSIPS is to move the Navy from paper to electronic records, putting personnel and pay documents into a format accessible via a portal on the service's intranet.

"In just a few months, sailors will have quick, secure and user-friendly access to their personnel records," Cmdr. Susan Eaton, system and software engineering manager for the NSIPS Program Office, said in a statement. "It will be the first of many tangible benefits the Navy will realize through the use of NMCI."

To perform a task as simple as changing one's address on a personnel record, sailors must visit a personnel office. When in use via NMCI, NSIPS will allow the same action to be done at a computer workstation.

The current version of NSIPS is based on a client/server model, with field-level servers that connect to Navy and Defense Department servers in several locations. The Web-enabled version is near completion, according to a statement by EDS, but the date for completion remains unclear.

Once approval is received through the DOD Information Technology Security Certification and Accreditation Process, NSIPS will be the first enterprisewide application to fully operate within NMCI.

Eventually, NSIPS will be replaced by the Defense Integrated Military Human Resource System, according to EDS spokesman Kevin Clarke. That system — when fully deployed by the end of fiscal 2006 at an estimated cost of $500 million — will provide an integrated personnel and payroll system for all military service members. It will be based on commercial software developed by PeopleSoft Inc.

To develop and maintain the client/server and Web-enabled versions of NSIPS, the Navy needed to upgrade its test and development environment. EDS, Dell Computer Corp., EMC Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and WorldCom Inc. received contracts to provide the necessary enterprisewide infrastructure and services.

According to the Navy, it has rolled out more than 57,000 NMCI seats to date and has received approval to roll out as many as 160,000. The next major milestone for the project requires EDS to fulfill certain service-level agreements. When that happens, the company expects to receive approval to roll out an additional 150,000 seats.