Officials defend Navy intranet satisfaction survey

Officials at the Navy Marine Corps Intranet program vigorously defended the network's customer satisfaction ratings Tuesday, saying that a large portion of complaints come from users who were recently brought into the new system.

The intranet--which could end up costing more than $8 billion--is being developed by Texas-based defense contractor EDS as a secure network that will soon connect more than 350,000 military and civilian users. In early August, NMCI officials said the program was nearing an 80 percent customer satisfaction rate. Some military and civilian users, however, have expressed skepticism over those statistics and have harshly criticized the program.

The surveys are conducted by EDS, a fact that has raised further suspicions among disgruntled users. While the contractor has put a significant investment into the development of NMCI, it stands to receive financial rewards as it meets contract benchmarks, including customer satisfaction goals. NMCI officials said they have complete faith in the integrity of the survey.

"There is absolutely no reason to believe that the results they are giving are tampered with," said Edward Schmitz, the customer satisfaction chief at the NMCI director's office.

Capt. Chris Christopher, NMCI's deputy director for Future Operations, Communications and Business Initiatives, acknowledged that it could present a hypothetical conflict of interest to have a contractor conduct a survey in which the results might present a financial windfall. He defended the practice, however, in the case of NMCI.

"In theory, yes. In practice … this is not happening in a vacuum," Christopher said. He also noted that the survey process is written into the NMCI contract. EDS officials declined to comment on the customer satisfaction survey.

Officials said the NMCI office has the responsibility to oversee the survey, and is developing the first review of the process.

"We always have the right and responsibility to audit the results, and that is what we are doing now," Schmitz said.

Christopher said some service personnel are also unfairly blaming the new technology for unrelated problems. As the new network has been rolled out, some users must keep their legacy systems to operate specialty programs. NMCI sharply restricts the variety of programs that can be used. One Navy civilian called NMCI a "perfect communist system; it wants to be all things to all people but it doesn't allow any tailoring."

Christopher said the limited availability has nothing to do with the NMCI technology but is a result of a decision that was "made all the way up the chain of command" to cut the number of applications that run on the Navy's network. He referred to the service's older, unregulated and disperse systems as the "wild, wild, West."

"We want to strike the appropriate balance between security and usefulness," Christopher said. "We're forcing them to live in a planned community … a lot of people just flat out don't like that."

NMCI officials did acknowledge that they are having difficulties with several aspects of the program, including the installation of NMCI "seats" at remote locations. Christopher also said that connecting by dial-up is difficult because of required security measures.

"You can have security or you can have high performance, but you can't always have both at the same time," he said.

A number of users have complained that they have not been asked to take an NMCI survey, but Christopher said that all users should receive a customer satisfaction survey once every fiscal year.