At work we have the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) as our IT infrastructure. It's the most hideous thing ever created. Unusable, slow, blocked from upgrades, it's just a mutant beast of a system. NMCI is run by Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and provides our machines and our network. You don't want to know how much we pay for it.
I had an NMCI fellow in my office today standing around while both of us watched my machine react to commands like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey after most of his circuit cards had been removed. While we waited for this constipated bowel movement of a system to execute some trivial task I asked him, "So, when you go back to your office, do you use NMCI?"
He replied, "No."
Never take a drug a doctor wouldn't use on themselves in a similar circumstance.
Update: An anonymous commenter has written to say that NMCI tech support does use NMCI. I'm not sure this makes me feel any better. The thing is so horrid that if this is true, all I would do would be to change the headline to "NMCI Tech Support is Forced to use NMCI" and rewrite the post to ask for a Geneva Convention ruling on inflicting this torture on those poor tech support folks.
*chuckles* Yeah, you should have heard my shop full of geeks scream when we found out that installing updates on our system-- the ones that Windows puts out every few weeks? -- would be charged as installing a full new program....
ReplyDeleteUnless this was someone such as a Dell technician, this is not true. They log onto a different domain when they are at their office. I have support the base I work on for ten years now, including two years as an NMCI Tech. We use NMCI as well, and could often be just as confounded as everyone else by it. But I certainly agree there is room for improvement - and that many of the tech support (both on site and on the Help Desk) are cluseless enough not to know what system they do use!
ReplyDeleteThe comment about being charged by NMCI for Windows Updates...total crap. That simply is NOT true.
ReplyDeleteTrue or not, NMCI is one of the worst systems out there. There may be several hundred thousand users on the system, but most of it simply doesn't work.
ReplyDeleteNetwork bandwidth is a joke.
We are charged for extra network disk space monthly that we do not have use of.;
We are charged extra for mail box space ($3/month for +50MB) - Google gives 1GB for free to unlimited users. Spam is out of control on this system. The sys-admins don't know how to fix this problem;
We are charged again and again for Move, Add, Changes (MACs) that have to be re-done over and over. We have to pay for it again when a machine gets re-imaged (because Tech support does not know how to fix simple problems);
We don't have the simple, Commercial-Of-The-Shelf software on our machines that we need to do our jobs because it has to be tested for compliance with the NMCI system (roughly $8000 per piece of software); even the simple software takes one to two years to be tested (I have case after case of this!)
I could go on and on about this system, but I will leave that up to the thousands of other users that find this blog to add their two cents worth.
Thanks for this article, really useful piece of writing.
ReplyDeleteThe comment about being charged by NMCI for Windows Updates...total crap. That simply is NOT true.
ReplyDelete