Enlisted personnel are free to express their opinions and can even voice dissent. Morris, who along with Capt. Fred Bertsch (ret.) sketched the concept of NKO on a napkin last February, likes to say that NKO "tilts the Navy's vertical structure just a little bit. It lets our leadership see what the sailors think."
Lt. Eric Morris
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NKO, according to Morris, not only moves a certain amount of training and knowledge sharing from the classroom and ships to the online world, but it also "exposes good thinking. It lets people think of themselves as really owning what they work on."
The rank and file aren't ordered to use NKO. They are given incentive to do so, though, because it will help their careers. The first mission of NKO is to aid in training and learning. Sailors can find experts to answer a single question or to tutor them for long periods, even while either or both party is at sea. It's quite a new concept for sailors, who compete with their peers for promotions. They are not accustomed to helping other sailors get ahead. Sailors can even track their progress toward promotions using a color-coded skills graph.
Longer term, the vision for NKO is grander. The goal is to get the right information to the right sailor at the right time. As early as next year, a technician tasked with repairing a wing on a fighter jet will be able to call up the precise portion of the 12-inch-thick repair manual that he needs and view detailed multimedia tutorials on how to make the repair, complete with video streaming. The presentation will combine information from the wing manufacturer as well as tacit knowledge from Navy experts who have made the same repair in the past, says Rear Admiral Kevin Moran, who is in charge of naval training. Accuracy of data is vital: One wrong move and that plane falls out of the sky.
Perhaps the strangest thing we learned is that there is no visible technologist in charge of NKO. We got the sense that the Navy could give a flip about what technology they use, so long as it works. This was confirmed for us pretty well when Morris told a story about a technology consultant who tried to FUD him and an admiral or two. Apparently, this guy was waving his arms and spouting dire predictions about their doom should they go down the ill-fated JHTML path. Since Morris and company were a little more interested in business rules and measuring the project's success through outside metrics, such as fleet effectiveness, discussing technology didn't go over too well.
And, in fact, the NKO is so simple from a technology perspective that we imagine swapping out specific technologies would be easy. NKO is your typical Web-server, application-server, database-server portal. What's interesting is that an organization like the Navy rolled it out, deciding that speed and low cost would take precedence (particularly at the beginning) over things like fault tolerance.
Rear Admiral Kevin Moran
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Morris says, "We pitched NKO to the CNO [Chief of Naval Operations, the highest ranking officer in the Navy] in April 2002...the next time we talked was in September. We had done our research and put together a beta [version]. That's fast, especially in the Navy. The CNO still wanted to know how come it's not going faster."
Clearly there's a sense of urgency about this project, and the urgency isn't about being the first on the block to implement Web services (which, by the way, the project is using at this point) or which load balancer is in use (Cisco's) or even whether the database backend is unbreakable (a single Sun server running Oracle 8i).
The top official we met with was Admiral Moran, Commander of the Naval Personnel Development Command (training unit). He's clearly been drinking the Kool Aide. When we asked him, "What are you going to do in a year if NKO doesn't produce measurable success?" he quickly responded that NKO will produce good results--that NKO is inevitable and important and necessary to the future of the Navy. His conviction is striking. After all, the critical question for fleet readiness is not "will it be ready" but rather "how ready will it be?"
Also notable is the Navy's choice of KM vendor: Appian. Never heard of 'em? Neither had we. The Navy chose the little-known software developer and systems integrator over IBM because it wanted personal attention and the ability to influence future revs of the product. (The Army already had hired Appian to build Army Knowledge Online, a 1-million-user network that is less a KM project and more an enterprise portal.) And it's working--version 3 of Appian's KM package will incorporate many additions and changes requested by the Navy.
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