The $10 billion Navy-Marine Corps. (NMCI) intranet is not meeting its goals. The 10-year project steered by EDS has not met most of its key objectives.

Worse yet, a report by the Government Accountability Office (see GAO-07-51) is critical of NMCI for never implementing a plan developed in 2000 to measure and report project progress. GAO says that NMCI intranet – subsequently valued at $12 billion – has met a paltry three of 20 performance targets set for the intranet.

Yet again there’s proof positive that without a plan, most intranets fail and die. Many die a slow death, but they all die without a proper – and implemented – plan.

"By not implementing its performance plan, the Navy has invested, and risks continuing to invest heavily, in a program that is not subject to effective performance management and has yet to produce expected results," auditors said.

The consolidated voice, video and data network links hundreds of thousands of military and at its peak will connect more than 500,000 sailors and Marines at about 1,000 locations across the planet.

NMCI intranet facts from EDS:

• More than 500,000 users are on board NMCI. Only the Internet is larger.
• More than 305,000 seats are under EDS management – a single seat, such as a workstation or laptop, can support more than one user.
• More than 260,000 seats have been transitioned to the end-state NMCI environment.
• More than 346,000 seats are on order.
• NMCI and EDS operate:
• Four network operations centers
• Three enterprise help desks
• Sixteen (of 19 planned) classified server farms
• Thirty-one (of 31 planned) unclassified servers farms
• More than 350 sailors have attained IT-related certifications at no cost to the government, including the Department of the Navy’s first three Microsoft-certified systems engineers.
• Improved security is unquestionably NMCI’s greatest value:
• In 2005, NMCI's security stopped more than 20 million attacks on the network.
• Each month, NMCI traps, quarantines and disinfects approximately 70,000 viruses.

Read GAO’s entire evaluation report.

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The General Motors intranet portal is a case study in creating a single, unified portal access in a sprawling enterprise of decentralized business units, far flug geographic locations and many different work cultures. It takes a massive effort to create a single portal environment in an organization of more than 300,000 in 33 different countries.

 Read the entire case study Intranet case study: GM’s mySocrates.

Most intranets have humble beginnings that grow and grow and then, like a weed, grow out of control. Fidelity’s intranet began at the grass-roots level in the mid-1990s, and since then has undergone three formal design iterations – with many smaller enhancements along the way. 

In 1997, the first official corporate intranet introduced content integrity standards, a cohesive information architecture, and a standard look and feel.  In 2002, the introduction of portal technology allowed content to be targeted to employees based on criteria such as business unit, region or role, and enabled each employee to customize the homepage to best meet their needs. The portal’s user interface got an extreme makeover in 2006, with a streamlined appearance, added functionality, and improved performance.