The Admiral Who Brings Order to the 'Wild, Wild West" of Information Systems

As Director of the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), Rear Adm. Charles L. Munns will be remembered as the man who wired the services' vast bureaucracies together. He is replacing more than 1,000 military information systems in the two services with a single network that will provide most Sailors and Marines with voice, video and data communications.

Yet Munns and his staff will not buy a single computer or inch of wire. They are buying services, not hardware, under provisions of the largest information technology contract in U.S. government history. The existing systems now run by Navy and Marine Corps people are being phased out in favor of an enormous centralized system operated by EDS, the Plano, Texas, contractor that beat out two top competitors for the NMCI prize, a contract potentially worth $6.9 billion.

EDS will manage communications services that link 360,000 seats, or desktops, throughout the United States and in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Japan. Despite the size of the task, Munns says it is not technology but cultural change that is the biggest obstacle to his success. "It's huge," he says. "We're going from the wild, wild west to a planned system" that will deprive some Sailors and Marines of their favorite applications and impose new security requirements. Many resist, at first.

Munns, who commanded Submarine Force Sixth Fleet and has been chief financial officer and chief information officer for the Pacific Fleet, discussed these and other issues with Editor in Chief Rick Barnard.

A unique element of NMCI is that you're not buying hardware. You're buying services. Why did you decide to contract out?

MUNNS: That was a huge decision point that we dealt with up front. We decided two things: First, the creation of information systems is not core to our business. Our core business is putting ships and planes and Marines overseas to protect our national interests. Second, we could not capitalize this in the first year to the magnitude that would be required. Industry could. EDS has put a huge amount of capital into NMCI to get it going.

But how do you tell EDS precisely what level of services you want.

MUNNS: First, we pulled state-of-the-art requirements from industry. What happens at, for example, IBM or Caterpillar [when a new system is installed]? Then we made some small modifications to accommodate what we thought might be different for us. Second, we put a large incentive on customer satisfaction. Once a year, every employee takes a customer satisfaction survey. It's 10 simple questions, but basically, "are you satisfied with the service or not?" And the contractor gets a healthy sum of incentive dollars for achieving high levels of satisfaction.

Who controls the survey?

MUNNS: It's a joint survey. We both agree to the questions. We administer it through a web-device over the Internet so it's an e-mail that shows up on your desk. The last approval number was 71 percent, I think. The quarter before that, it was down in the 60s. And I'm not surprised because NMCI really is a big cultural change for our people. But I'm encouraged by the increase.

What number does EDS have to hit to get an incentive award?

MUNNS: It's a little complex but the simple answer is 85 percent, then EDS gets an incentive award.

The press has covered EDS' initial investment in the system, which is about $1.5 billion. But the other side of the coin is profit. What's in it for EDS?

MUNNS: I certainly can't give the numbers, nor do I necessarily know. That's their business. But the value of the incentive awards is public knowledge. EDS can earn up to $100 per seat, per quarter. With over 300,000 people, that's big bucks.

But there is another important point. The people who put the contract in place did a great job because there's a clause in there about equal sharing. We will look at our costs year by year. To the extent that costs get lower each year because of technology improvements or management improvements or whatever, we equally share in that benefit. So the contractors get the increase in profit, as they should, but we get a reduced price, as we should.

Is there resistance in the Navy when you go into a command and say "We're here to change your systems, you lucky people"?

MUNNS: Yes. Absolutely. The largest part of my job probably is working through that cultural change. It is huge. We're going from the wild, wild west to a planned system. We're going from a place where you have about a thousand different networks--all locally owned and locally controlled and locally purchased--to a central system. The migration from local control to central control is a huge cultural change.

And applications! We had 100,000 different applications that were on these thousand networks. You can't run an intranet with that--nor would we want to. So we've trying to drive down to about 2,000 applications. This means that many people out there are losing their favorite application. But they're going to get a corporate one in its place and one that's inter-operable.

And then there is security. It means we're watching what web sites you go to. It means you have to have a strong password and change it periodically. It means if you don't use your machine for a certain number of minutes, or hours, it locks up and you have to re-enter your password.

I think the two, the applications and the security, mean big changes for users.

What does NMCI mean to Navy and Marine Corps people who are deployed?

MUNNS: There are three pieces to our information systems and ships need all three pieces to do their jobs. There is NMCI, which is the shore-based network in the United States. The overseas shore-based network is physically European. And then there's the at-sea network, Information Technology for the 21st Century, or IT-21. With NMCI, we now will have the capacity to march all three of those systems together. We could not do that with 1,000 different networks.

We will probably merge the three systems in the years to come. There's already lots of reach-back in the Navy for information and advice. And there is going to be more in the future. A Navy-wide system would [enable more] people to do [tasks such as calling up digitized repair manuals].

Will there be some Marine Corps seats among the 310,000 seats you are now authorized to install?

MUNNS: Yes. About 90,000 of those are Marine seats. The rest are Navy.

Would it save the taxpayers money if the Air Force or Army put in a system like NMCI?

MUNNS: Well it's certainly saving us money in the long run. The Navy commands don't necessarily agree because they're not always getting apples-to-apples comparisons. The cost of NMCI is about the same as what we were spending before. But we're getting a whole lot more capability. There is a help desk 24 hours, 7 days a week, and security, the whole bit. It is considerably cheaper than what we would have had to spend to put it through encryption, which NMCI is doing, or records management, which NMCI is doing. Also, the price we pay includes an upgrade of the hardware every three years and a refresh on the software.

What was the original impetus for the creation of NMCI?

MUNNS: You're now going back about four years. Several parts of the Navy were looking at our information management. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command was looking very hard at it. So was the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations.

We were struggling to get our arms around our information and just wasting peoples' time and energy. The function of closing the books offers a good example. Private companies quickly can understand what they're spending. At Cisco, it's the next day. At other companies, the standard was probably a week or a month. We didn't know until three years later.

Also, we were not interactive. Whoever wanted to know something would go out and ask everybody else to send him or her the data in a particular format. Then somebody else would ask for the same data but in different format. During the same time frame, it became obvious that we were going to be at war on our networks. There were going to be battles out there and we had to win them.

Before NMCI, did the various commands have the flexibility to buy what they wanted?

MUNNS: Yes. Typically, this is all operations and maintenance money. And they would buy when they could. Often, the commands would purchase at the end of the year. You look around and see how much money you had left. You knew you needed these things. You bought small quantities, bought without a sense for what everybody else had or even without much sense of where you wanted to go. I'm probably being a little bit harsh here, but not too much,

In a recent article, you said Navy systems had more than 16,000 intruders in 2001 and that "reportedly, al Queda and potential adversary nations have sought cyber attack capabilities." How has NMCI done at keeping the bad guys out?

MUNNS: I feel pretty good about the security of NMCI. This past fall, the commercial networks were attacked at least three times. There was an attack on the Internet in October. There were a couple of worms and viruses that went around. This past winter, the SQL slammer [an invasive computer worm] put down ATM machines and 911 phone systems. NMCI was not affected. It protected us from all three of those.

Viruses are not necessarily attacks but are sicknesses out there. In the process of transferring people's files from their old computers to NMCI, we discovered about twice as many viruses this year as last. That tells me that those viruses were always there but we just didn't know it. And now we're discovering them and cleaning them up.

Do you hire hacker teams to attack the system?

MUNNS: We have a red team and a green team using various agencies. We use them to understand how can we improve the design of the system.

What criteria do you use to measure your own success?

MUNNS: One criterion would be the seat counts. When we get above 75 percent of our total, we'll have the market share and the hard stuff will be behind us. Next would be user satisfaction. That measures the cultural change as much as the technical ability of the system. When 90 percent of the people say, "Yeah, I couldn't do my job without this," that means we will have made the cultural leap that is needed.*