NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Navy Knowledge Online, the portal sailors use access for everything from e-learning to professional development resources, is a pain, the Navy's personnel boss said Tuesday, and his office is in the early stages of coming up with an alternative.
"NKO stinks," Vice Adm. Bill Moran told attendees said during a speaking event at the annual Sea Air Space Exposition outside Washington, D.C. "I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's too slow. It's burdensome."
Revamping NKO is one step in Moran's push to overhaul the Navy's information technology infrastructure, to make so training and education resources are more readily available and easier to access fleetwide, especially at sea.
"We need to move completely off that system, but we need to capture it in a different way," he said.
One of the upgrades needed, he said, is to make it easier to access for sailors at sea, who are competing for a very limited amount of ship-based Internet bandwidthconnectivity.
The other is a cosmetic face lift.
Digital Show Daily: Complete coverage from the Navy League Sea-Air-Space Exposition
"The more I talk to sailors, the more we recognize the frustrations of young men and women going through the system, not having a technology system that looks something like what they've grown up with the past 10 years," he said.
Moran's office wants it to look like a modern system — he highlighted the used the Marine Corp's Marine Knowledge Online system as an example — with some upgrades to make it a little "smarter."
"Why can't I swipe my ID card when I go on NKO, and it knows who I am and it knows the last time I logged on?" he said.
So does this mean the impending doom of NKO?
"That's something I'd love to do, but right now we need to fix the [information technology] piece before we would get rid of NKO, or improve NKO so it's got the bandwidth and the capability to do what we really need it to do," Moran said.
The Chief of Naval Operations Rapid Innovation Cell is one place that might incubate ideas for an NKO upgrade, but CNP's office is also looking to the fleet for suggestions.
"I've asked my team to put aside their egos and to give it to fleet lieutenants and first class petty officers," he said. "Those guys know how to do it. That collaboration is going on right now."
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.
