Navy CIOs face Web task force

Task Force Web home page

Twenty-four Navy chief information officers are readying their defenses for meetings July 11-16 with the task force established to cut down on the Navy's thousands of legacy applications.

The Navy is trying to identify 50 applications that it can include on its Navy Marine Corps Intranet portal by November, said Monica Shephard, the chairwoman of Task Force Web.

Following the meetings with the task force, the CIOs will meet individually with Adm. William Fallon, the vice chief of Naval operations, to go over how many legacy applications they have and what their plans are to reduce that number before deploying NMCI, Shephard said. Fallon created Task Force Web in April to serve as the focal point for the application migration effort.

The CIOs submitted their legacy application migration plans to Task Force Web last month, Shephard said.

In their presentations to the task force and to Fallon, the CIOs will describe their command's business and systems requirements, their commitment to migrating applications to the Web and how they are going to do it, she said.

However, Capt. Martin Menez, the Naval Reserve Force's CIO, said it's unclear how his organization will pay for applications it wants to enable for the Web, said Capt. Martin Menez, the Naval Reserve Force's CIO. "The word on the street is there are no new funds," he said. NMCI contractor Electronic Data Systems Corp. is supplying a "connection to but not a Web-enablement of applications," he said.

"The target is clear," Menez said of the Navy's 2004 goal to Web-enable its applications. "It's just the trajectory is not."

Menez spelled out three options his organization has for paying for Web-enabled applications:

* The user organization of a particular application could pay for Web-enabling it.

* The organization that sets the system requirements could pay.

* The organization that originally funded the application could pay.

Shephard, the director of space, information warfare, command and control for the Atlantic Fleet in Norfolk, Va., said that her task force has identified 63 applications out of an earlier list of 114 that are technically easy to Web-enable and are important to sailors. By November, the Navy will put 50 of the applications on its NMCI portal, she said.

Task force members have also identified 626 applications that have broad use in the Navy, Shephard said. "We may decide it's best to merge applications" because many applications are merely different versions of the same basic software application, she said. "In the process of selecting them, some may self-select out."

The Navy Department chief information office defines a legacy application as any application that runs on an operating system other than Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 2000, which is the standard operating system for NMCI.