The world’s biggest, most expensive and troubled intranet – the U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) – has delivered good news this week. Intranet user satisfaction for the fourth quarter ending December 2005 hit 74%. Unfortunately, user satisfaction fell 4% from 78% during the third quarter.

What’s the good news you ask? Firstly, the Navy and Marine Corps intranet team has the intelligence to ask for their soldiers, sailors, marines and civilian employees’ opinions once per quarter. NMCI is measuring and tracking user satisfaction and acting on it to improve the end product.

The second reason that this is good news is that more than 19,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel took the time to take the survey – a survey that is done once per quarter! Now there were 141,000+ surveys sent out (big organization the Navy and Marine Corps), which is a response rate of 14%. That’s not bad given they do a survey once per month and many of those personnel are focused on saving lives. (I’ve worked with dozens of companies and their intranets and talked with hundreds of others… and there are a lot of companies that won’t free up a few thousand dollars for one survey a year! These companies prefer to guess at what their target audience needs. Shameful, but true).

The other good news this week is that the Navy has appointed a new chief to oversee the $8 billion intranet. A reorganization in the ranks made NMCI director Rear Admiral James B Godwin III the program manager mantle reporting directly to The Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. The reorganization also has led to restructuring of the Navy and Marine Corps program offices as well as “realignment of server consolidations and legacy network reduction.”

Let’s hope the changes are more than just window dressing for a project riddled with issues. Rear Admiral Godwin is given the chore of cleaning-up what has been a messy project suffering from bad public relations, cost problems, vendor (EDS) issues, security issues and even a lobbyist scandal (See $9 Billion Bugs for U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Intranet and World’s Biggest Intranet and Scandal rocks world’s biggest intranet and EDS – king of intranet pain).

On another note, it looks like the Rear Admiral’s team has given the NMCI a tweaked design. Quite honestly I think it’s rather weak… but 74% user satisfaction is a far more important metric than what I think…