Navy intranet's Iraq setback

[thedrifter]

Navy intranet's Iraq setback
1 September 2003

A project lying at the heart of the US military's modernisation efforts has suffered delays caused by the Iraq conflict

The US Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) is reported to be further delayed, due to the ongoing military operations in Iraq.

The system is said to be partially completed, with 95,000 seats (workstations) out of over 300,000 now set up, although efforts to set up a operations centre suffered setbacks in August 2003 because there were not enough marines and sailors available to begin using the network as they were still fighting in Iraq.

According to captain Chris Christopher, the staff director for the NMCI, while not disastrous for the system the timetable has been held up.

"A big chunk of the Marine Corps has deployed and that has affected the schedule of the Marine Corps' roll out," US publication Federal Computer Week reported him as saying.

"There was no catastrophic effect but it did have an impact."

NMCI is the one of the most ambitious of the US Government's IT projects and is supplied by EDS under a contract worth around $9bn. It has suffered a number of delays in the past, mainly caused by the difficulty of integrating complex legacy systems.

Despite the latest delays, the operations centre is due to be running in September 2003 with the marines due to begin using the system over the following two months. Before this, there is to be an evaluation of the project examining its deployment and operation.

In addition to the Iraq delays, the system has also had to contend with a virus attack wiping out around three quarters of the network capacity.

While the NMCI managed to avoid the Blaster worm virus, which wreaked havoc with IT systems world wide, it was hit by a similar virus known as Welchia. The network was eventually restored last week.


Source: Kable's Government Computing
Publication date: 01/09/2003

http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/Front...6?OpenDocument

Sempers,

Roger