Intranet Installation Nears Completion

Signal, Sep 2007 by Lawlor, Maryann

Regarding the amount of spam that has been blocked, Col. Cross says the challenge is that the risk, no matter how small, still exists that legitimate e-mail will be blocked. "The bottom line though is that we are being very successful and we have relieved a significant amount of angst among our users who were getting things that were wasting their time, taking up bandwidth and presenting a real risk to the network," he says.

Another benefit of implementing the world's largest network is the lessons learned by both the customer and the provider. "Never enter into a transformational program like this without a change management approach. That would be one of them." Arbour states. "Seriously, I think people underestimate the transformational, dynamic nature of information technology. Any time you drive a change into the information technology system, you will always impact something or somebody. If you don't have a change program wrapped around that, then something or somebody will come back and get you."

The EDS team also learned that all stakeholders must be included and a governance model must be in place in a project as diverse and large as the NMCI. A governance model was not in place at the beginning of the NMCI project, she adds.

Arbour says that a good governance model helps ensure that individual customers are satisfied with a change as transformational as the NMCI undertaking. Users must be kept informed constantly and consistently, especially as the crest of the change wave heads their way. "As an end user, if you don't know that a Mac truck is coming your way, and it hits you, you're going to be upset. So in order for our customers not to be upset, we bring certain pockets of customers together. We put them in a forum, we get all of their feedback, we apply it and we communicate it back to them in writing and with demonstrable change in the environment," Arbour says.

This kind of communications ensures that users understand that sometimes the problems they are experiencing are not part of the change. "That's why they [the users] were upset. Nobody talked to them. And now they're being spoken to and they're being included in driving the change and the improvement. To me, it's human nature; it's logic. Now some of it quite frankly the Navy is never going to get away from because users want their system at work to be exactly as it is at home, and it's not going to be," Arbour notes.

For its part, EDS has overhauled its approach to solving users' problems. It has undertaken a transformation with the goal of being able to resolve an end user's problem at the service-desk level whenever possible. This would reduce the number of times a user has to send in an item for repair. "We're trying to make it very, very easy on them," Arbour says.

Between the Navy's efforts and those of the contractor, user satisfaction is climbing bit by bit. This is particularly important to EDS because the NMCI contract calls for an 85 percent customer satisfaction rate, and the company is rewarded for successfully meeting and exceeding this goal. Surveys are conducted quarterly to assess satisfaction; the survey was revamped in 2007 to focus more on daily operations, help desk issues, local and remote base operations support and communications.