The Department of the Navy intends to take back much of the decision-making authority from the prime contractor of its $9.9 billion Navy Marine Corps Intranet contract.
Navy officials say the network has become a major command-and-control component and is embedded in almost everything the service does. EDS, the prime contractor for NMCI, owns the network infrastructure, but the Navy has the option to buy that infrastructure.
Although the original NMCI contract ends in a year and a half, the Navy is developing a new contract that officials say is likely to outsource less work. Under that contract, Defense Department personnel would take over some of the functions contractors perform.
“You would imagine the person making network decisions at the very heartbeat of the network would be something that government would want to control,” said Robert Carey, the Navy’s chief information officer. Those kinds of changes could happen at the network operating centers at San Diego; Quantico, Va.; and Norfolk, Va. Government workers are in those centers, but the key decision-makers are EDS employees.
Officials in the Bush administration and Congress have major concerns with contractors coming too close to performing inherently governmental functions, which only a federal employee should handle.
The decision-making responsibilities could be shifted to a Naval command, a civilian executive or some combination of the two. The planning for that type of change is not complete, Carey said.
“That doesn’t mean there won’t be a contract,” Carey said. “It means there will be a large contract, but there will be operational control decisions managed by the government. Today, some of those decisions are managed by the EDS team on behalf of government per the contract.”
Making fundamental changes is typical both in government and business when it comes to the second generation of initiatives as complex as NMCI, said Lorrie Scardino, an analyst at Gartner.
“When an organization undertakes an initiative as big as NMCI, there are so many moving parts that need to be considered, and I think even the best organizations in the world don’t adequately consider all those moving pieces,” Scardino said.
The Navy is a Gartner client, so Scardino couldn’t talk specifically about NMCI’s hurdles, but she said organizations often run into trouble if there isn’t a total buy-in for the plan across the entire organization.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
