Over the past several decades, the size and duration of contractors for services, particularly in the areas of information technology (IT) and networking, have increased significantly. The problem with massive, long-duration IT contracts is that the pace of technological change often makes them out-of-date almost from the start. An example of one such big contract is the Navy’s new contract to manage multiple IT networks, called the Next Generation Enterprise-Recompete (NGEN-R).
With a potential ceiling of almost $8 billion dollars, the NGEN-R is one of the largest non-hardware contracts ever awarded. The primary objective of the contract is to manage, modernize and eventually merge several massive Navy and Marine Corps networks that collectively encompass some 400,000 computers and 800,000 users at 2,500 locations.
That was from Dan Goure, “A Pentagon Procurement Program That Seems Doomed to Fail.” The purpose of NGEN is to modernize the Navy/Marines IT into a cloud-native architecture over five years. The legacy system, Navy-Marines Corps Intranet (NMCI) was started back in 2000. It relied on a closed system intranet rather than on a secure cloud. That made it difficult for workers to access the internet and use applications supported through the cloud. As program manager Capt. Ben McNeal explained, the old architecture couldn’t even support Microsoft Office 365. Here he is speaking with Jared Serbu on the On DoD podcast:
The “I” in NMCI stands for intranet, which means it supports a number of nodes within the Department of Navy family, and there’s a fence around it to protect it. So when we built that construct for internal data transfer across the continental United States for NMCI and a boundary around that. That’s really the mindset and mantra of what NMCI is. As we’ve evolved over time, more of a need for users to access the internet, more of our data in outside that boundary either on the internet or government clouds, there is a need to get beyond the intranet, but the intranet makes up the fundamental architecture.
I suppose Goure’s worry is that NGEN-R will repeat the same mistakes of the past with overly ambitious technical goals and mega-sized contracts which may end up leaving the DoD a generation behind. Cloud-native technologies are not state-of-the-art, but neither was intranet networking in 2000. Capt. McNeal used a good work for it, state-of-the-shelf. I suppose the longer running question is whether complex enterprises can move under a unified architectures from the top-down.
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