The Navy Learns IT Lessons the Hard Way

The popular term is RAD, it stands for Rapid Application Development, and in the IT business most professionals refer to RAD as an inside joke. Any software rapidly produced from scratch and any hardware rapidly deployed without fully understanding the relationship between value and cost of ownership is asking for one thing. Higher cost.

I have that poster up in my office, more for satire than anything, but also because it is a reminder the statement is especially true in IT, which is why the IT consultants I place are very good, and demand to be paid like it. Done right, and by that I mean once and efficiently, IT can save money. Done wrong, IT raises cost.

From Janes.

The US Navy’s strategy in recent years of acquiring the ‘latest and greatest’ commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology, sought to rapidly modernize its fleet, is to be overhauled due to serious maintenance problems, it was announced recently in Virginia.

Tara Copp for Jane’s Navy International reports that the shake-up will affect shipboard command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems.

“The lack of understanding of the service-life of all the commercial C4ISR solutions on board leaves a large budget uncertainty for future ship maintenance budgets, at a time when the US Navy is trying hard to rein in maintenance and modernization spending in order to afford its envisioned 313-ship fleet,” reports Copp.

Jane’s Navy International reports that Rear Admiral Charles E Smith, vice-commander of the USN Space and Naval Warfare Systems says that the failure to apply traditional inventory and service-life maintenance schedules to the COTS shipboard systems is foremost among issues.

Speaking at the 2007 Fleet Maintenance Symposium in Virginia Beach, Rear Adm Smith said this lack of information is amplified by the fact that thousands of parts have been procured for transmitter and sensor systems used to operate more than 600 individual communications networks worldwide, without an accurate inventory of when maintenance will be needed on those parts.

He added that the technology pull on COTS has resulted in situations where systems are not tested until just prior to deployment, leaving insufficient time for crew training and creating unresolved communications issues that are fixed only after the ship is underway.

While “we have yet to stop a ship because its C4I did not work,” he said, “we can no longer wait until they sail away.”

“The C4I world has accelerated rapidly and procured a lot and now we have to go do some knuckle dragging,” added Rear Adm Smith, “Rather than driving ourselves to a refresh rate that we can not keep up with, we have asked the hard question: are we being artificially driven and can we slow this process down?”

Jane’s Navy International reports that the service is now trying to slow down the acquisition process, particularly because its next-generation ships are so software-dependent.

The Navy should slow down, this is the right move. Rapidly adapting to new technologies is expensive anyway, particularly hardware which is in a constant state of flux. The latest and greatest is nice, but older systems still become dependencies, and ultimately don't scale which creates a bottleneck anyway. Adm Smith is in a tough position that I appreciate because I see it constantly in government.

COTS means cheaper and easier to acquire up front, but there are cost of ownership issues that don't pop up until you deal with the logistics of the equipment. That process in IT only occurs after ownership, and is almost always a time consuming process in pinpointing systems and components most likely to create problems. When you factor in integration, which is the key technology enabler for the Navy in the 21st century, the challenges are demanding.

My advice, carefully define standards and choose wisely in procurement based on scalability, otherwise your warships, which are slowly becoming floating IT shops, will strain the support system. Lower cost in IT occurs from well determined standards and scalability designed to address total cost of ownership, not from starting sticker prices of COTS options. Ships are designed and built to operate between 25-50 years, while technology changes daily and even the best hardware has a realistic shelf life of 3 years. For a warship that serves for 30 years, if you are not designing your IT strategy around a ten time turnaround, with scalability from one generation to the next that allows for reuse of some components that don't change as frequently, the cost of ownership will be high.