Navy looks for enterprising apps

The Navy is in the early stages of rolling out the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, but officials are already looking at ways they can use the NCMI enterprisewide network to streamline applications across the organization, Navy officials said.

Enterprise systems will provide the Navy with solutions that will be less expensive overall, can be brought online faster and that are better suited for their tasks, Gale Williams, a Navy program officer, said during a Dec. 11 press briefing.

Furthermore, because those applications will use data collected from across the organization, they will enable personnel to make better and faster decisions, she said.

The approach being used for establishing enterprise solutions is similar to the ongoing work to streamline legacy applications in preparation for moving to the new, more secure NMCI network. The Navy has cleaned out thousands of applications as the service moves toward a standardized suite of applications.

So far, about 500 seats are on the NMCI network, which is being implemented by Electronic Data Systems Corp. under a $6.9 billion contract.

Williams said that as NMCI is rolled out further, the Navy is going through that process again but at a higher level, looking at applications that can exist servicewide.

As part of that effort, the Navy's Enterprise Solutions organization is identifying applications, the organization that owns those applications, and the requirements for those applications. The Navy is then shifting ownership of those applications to the leaders of the functional areas.

"We want them to take control for their own areas," Williams said.

Eventually there will be a determination as to whether applications are "enterprise-worthy," she said.

The Navy has not set a timetable for its enterprise efforts, nor has it calculated the cost savings that could result from streamlining its scores of applications, Williams said.