NMCI testing agreement reached

The Pentagon and the Navy have concluded months of discussions with an agreement that gives the $6.9 billion Navy Marine Corps Intranet conditional approval to move forward.

Following a week of last-minute haggling, John Stenbit, Defense Department chief information officer, and Michael Wynne, deputy undersecretary for Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, officially signed off on the NMCI decision memorandum Sept. 5.

The Navy and the Pentagon have been at loggerheads over the level of testing required for NMCI to move forward. The four-page memorandum, obtained by Federal Computer Week, lays out a phased approach to NMCI's rollout.

The agreement seeks to let the Navy move forward with outsourcing its information technology infrastructure to Electronic Data Systems Corp., and it sets a timetable for the DOD CIO to conduct reviews of specific milestones before the project can move further along.

The Defense Department said that the memorandum "authorizes the Department of Navy to proceed with the revised phased implementation of the NMCI project, subject to the test evaluation events and the [Office of the Secretary of Defense] senior-level reviews laid out in the memorandum."

The agreement increases the number of seats from about 42,000 to about 60,000 that the Navy can order before the Pentagon must certify NMCI.

Under the agreement, the DOD CIO will spearhead an independent review of NMCI's test and evaluation efforts to ensure those tests are "viable," the document says. That team will begin immediately and will examine the Navy's operational and business processes, joint interoperability and information assurance testing and will assess NMCI's customer test and evaluation.

Congress approved NMCI on the condition that the Navy institute a "strategic pause" after rolling out a percentage of desktops. Congress then required that Pentagon officials certify the program before it could proceed.

The Pentagon is "in discussions with Congress to gain support for the new strategy, and determine what changes, if any, are required in the law."

Navy and Pentagon officials have been seeking a strategy for months that would let NMCI move forward while addressing the Pentagon's concerns that the project should prove itself first. This agreement seeks to resolve that issue.