Navy may break Intranet contract into four pieces

By Jason Miller
Executive Editor
FederalNewsRadio

For the follow-on contract for the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet program, the Navy’s initial plan calls for four specific focus areas and bringing a larger portion of the operations and maintenance work back into the services.

Senior Navy officials, who spoke today at an AFCEA event in Arlington, Va., but wouldn’t agree to have their names used, say the future request for proposals could have four separate functional areas.

These include hardware and software, services, wide area communications and local service and communication needs.

But officials were clear that the acquisition strategy is far from being set in stone.

“We have received 43 white papers from industry and we are half way through them now,” says one senior official on a panel. “Once common theme so far is our approach seems to be validated in the way we are doing this.”

The Navy expects to have a second industry day for the Next Generation Intranet (N-Gen) program in December after they have finished reviewing the white papers and have issued a services specification document.

This document, which should be issued in the “next few weeks,” would describe each of these four areas, how they will work and how they all link together.

The official says there then would be another industry day in late winter and then the RFP would be issued in the spring.

“We are bringing a degree of government control into the N-Gen environment,” says another senior Navy official on the panel. “We are looking at command and control of network resources.”

The Navy already held an industry day Sept. 8 that attracted hundreds of vendors.

A senior official from the Marines says the service will move to N-Gen first as a test program.

“We are still figuring out what is other networks or applications could go on N-Gen,” the senior Marine official says.

The second senior Navy official says the Marines are in the best position to test the new network to help the Navy better understand how it will work.

To manage this process, the Navy and Marines are creating a Special Program Office to provide governance and oversight to the contract.

The office is not yet finalized, but should be in the next few weeks, officials say.

The second Navy official says the service historically hasn’t been good at translating requirements into the contract and eventually the network.

The official says they have learned through the NMCI process that governance is key.

The Navy and Marines are addressing governance by bringing together four groups in the Special Program Office: the policy group from the Navy chief information officer; the program manager for N-Gen; the operations office; and the financial and acquisition experts.

“The Special Program Office serves as the conduit between all of these areas,” the second Navy official says. “They then report to top level managers to create seamless oversight of the N-Gen process.”

There will be three divisions in the office, including plans, processes and programs, operations, and acquisition.

The N-Gen effort also coincides with the Navy’s work to reduce 500 legacy systems down to less than 200.

Under the Cyber Asset Reduction and Security (CARS) effort, the Navy hired CSC under a $66 million contract in December 2007 to provide cybersecurity, systems interoperability, reduce its land-based technology infrastructure and reduce the cost of network maintenance.

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On the Web:

U.S. Navy – N-Gen Web page

AFCEA – Monthly luncheon event Web page

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