Customized collaboration

By its very nature, the U.S. Navy is infused with units that think and act in an established and tactical way, which might not be the best environment for rolling out new software.

But it was in that atmosphere that the Navy's Tactical Information Technology Integration Program Office (TacIT IPO) rolled out Web-based collaboration software to create its Secure Information Management Environment (SIME). The program management system supports two missile programs that are a collaborative effort among 112 organizations. The software provides threaded discussions, document sharing, workflow, chat and instant messaging.

TacIT IPO deployed the software nearly three years ago to replace an aging and costly database-collaboration system that had limited sharing capabilities and required users to funnel new documents through a centralized administrator for posting.

While TacIT IPO can't reveal what it spent to deploy the system, the total of cost ownership is lower than the previous system, which required more applications and administrative overhead.

TacIT IPO, which provides IT solutions to a variety of Navy offices, has just completed Department of Defense security certification of SIME, which is built on SiteScape's Forum software running on Netscape Web Server software and serving nearly 3,000 users. Now TacIT IPO is actively recruiting other units of the Navy and branches of the military to adopt its model of Web-based program management.

"The Navy is recognizing that a lot of these business practices that have occurred for years and years have not changed and they want to be more up-to-date with the way work is done," says Jeffrey Thompson, technical services director for TacIT IPO. "Today, if you are going to be in the Navy and running on Navy networks, you are going to be Web-enabled, but you still run into outfits resistant to that change."

The first order of business for TacIT IPO was to replace its government off-the-shelf (GOTS) software with commercial off-the-shelf software from SiteScape. GOTS is homegrown software that is notoriously difficult to manage, maintain and modify, Thompson says.

TacIT IPO took on the challenge of switching systems by customizing SiteScape Forum to closely mimic the look and feel of GOTS software to minimize retraining, and then hooking users with new collaboration features.

"We elected to do the implementation this way so that when the end users came in to work on Monday after the migration, they would not have 'shell shock' from a new system they were not familiar with," says Sandy Grove, information services director for TacIT IPO.

With SIME, users can input and update the data, eliminating a bottleneck of the original software. The new system also added individual teamwork areas, workflow, more detailed action item consolidation/input, in-line CAD viewing and e-meetings.

The Navy also chose SiteScape because the vendor's browser-based client integrates with the Defense Department's public-key infrastructure model for security, which provides certificate-based single sign-on. The integration has been a blessing because TacIT IPO does not have to provide or maintain the security infrastructure, Thompson says.