Problems with the NMCI computer network have been identified by the GAO in a 2006 report "NMCI has not met its two strategic goals—to provide information

superiority and to foster innovation via interoperability and shared services." At a fundamental level the unique needs of the government are not understood by a contractor. Going forward, changes need to be made to if the original goals will ever be achieved.

An assessment of the system status should be done from the top down. The role of a contractor really needs to completely changed. The lead role should be the gov't. The contractor can maintain the system hardware and software but operation of the system should be performed by the gov't. The idea would be to leverage the strengths of each organization. One suggestion is to use a variety of contractors that do various things well. For example, Cisco for networking, HP for server farms, IBM for project admin, etc...

Technology needs to be used to bring everyone into the system. It's silly to have a Navy Marine network when not all of the Navy and Marines are on the network.

The software and hardware used is generationally challenged. Rather than change out the thousands of PC's every 3-4 years, a systemic change to move more applications to the cloud could allow the applications be kept to the most up to date. So the software on the cloud in updated, vice thousands of individual PCs.

Serious consideration should be made to break with the Microsoft OS. Other operating systems can be used for servers, and/or users. Places such as Spain and Germany use Linux for some of the gov't operations. For example, Internet Explorer is the default internet browser used on computer systems. The latest version (IE9) tested as the slowest of the browsers in general use and is used by choice by less than 50% of the general population.