Appian started NKO in September 2002, and with Morris as project manager, built the portal in about four months, spending, in total, $4.5 million for hardware; software (components of Appian's Enterprise, its "kitchen sink" product that includes portal management, content management, document management and other software); associated customization; and support and hosting fees.
It's no wonder that the NKO team has a sense of accomplishment. Says Bertsch, "I still have e-mails from people telling me that we were raising the expectations of sailors--it will take 10 years and $15 billion."
Measuring Success
The thought right after "Ready, aim, fire" should be, "Have we hit the target?"
The Navy had the right idea about what would constitute the ultimate measure of Task Force Excel and NKO's success: Has the Navy's fighting force become more efficient and more effective?
Unfortunately, like many large initiatives, no significant organizational change is expected in the very near term, so a year out of the gate, it's premature to look for results like "fewer training-mission errors made." However, these numbers are already tracked, and it should be easy to see trends as NKO becomes a part of Navy life. Naval Personnel Development Command is also working with the American Productivity and Quality Center to track this type of data.
"It will be really interesting to see this mature," says Rear Admiral Kevin Moran, Commander of NPDC and director of Task Force Excel. Moran expects that the
5 Vector Model and NKO will significantly improve sailor retention.
"You won't recognize the U.S. Navy," he says. "Right now our Zone A [first tour] retention is in the high 60 percent--this will make it even better."
For the moment, the goal of NKO is to get "market penetration," because it can't affect sailors unless sailors use it. Therefore, for the very short term, success is measured by voluntary adoption. By this metric, NKO has been successful--gaining 1,000 users per day.
Other statistics that will be gathered over the next few months include satisfaction with training, as well as the number of "communities of practice" (communities based on specific skills or trades) that sustain themselves--that is, that continue to have active traffic.
Building to Spec
Translating Task Force Excel's business objectives into NKO required that the Navy use in-house portal-building expertise--and take on permanent staff to do a quality job of maintenance and support--or partner with a vendor that could translate the Navy's vision into hard-core tech without losing sight of the all-important business objectives. Appian was the Navy's choice.
Myles Weber, an Appian program manager who works with the NKO team, says, "We're big fans of lots of equipment that is smaller. It helps us with scaling up." Instead of buying one huge server, the project team has concentrated on buying several smaller ones and load-balancing among them, clearly playing to the "cheap/now" part of the NKO business model.
Although neither Appian nor the Navy would provide us with all of the technical meat we requested, citing security concerns, they were sporting enough to show us at least some of the inner workings of NKO.
In general, NKO is built as you'd expect a portal system to be: a farm of application servers, Web servers, and--coming soon--multiple database servers. Two Sun Microsystems 880 quad-processor servers do the heavy lifting. The database server runs Oracle8i. A search server currently runs Verity's search engine, but will soon be converted to Convera's search engine for the sake of standardization. The balance of the servers, all of which run Solaris 2.8, are Sun 280Rs: two single-processor Web servers running iPlanet 4.1 and four application servers with dual processors. There is a Cisco Systems load balancer in front of the Web servers, and documents are stored on an EMC Clariion 4500 network-attached storage system (see graphic "Navy's NKO Architecture").
Appian, a J2EE shop, is in the process of converting from ATG's application server to BEA Sytems' WebLogic. The SIPRNet (Secure Internet Protocol Network) version is already on BEA WebLogic; the NIPRNet (Non-secure Internet Protocol Network) version is due to be converted in September.
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