By James Gallagher
Office of the CIO

The Department of the Navy plans to reduce its legacy applications by 95 percent over the next year. To meet this goal, the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) has assembled a team of functional area managers (FAMs) to assist Navy-level FAMs.

By direction of Admiral William J. Fallon, vice chief of naval operations, FAMs will direct migration, consolidation and retirement of applications in 23 functional areas. FAMs will also manage application portfolios and ensure that the Navy’s technology strategy is aligned with business processes and warfighting strategies.

“It is essential that NAVAIR aggressively pursues this effort,” said Linda Long, NAVAIR’s FAM coordinator. “The Navy is going to reduce applications to meet this goal. The scope is enormous in that we need to identify all NAVAIR applications, whether they run on NMCI or any other network. It is in our best interests to ensure that our applications are well represented.”

The goal of the reduction effort is to retain only those applications that support the Navy’s mission. By the third quarter of fiscal year 2003, no applications will run on Navy networks without FAM approval.

The Navy has separated all applications into 23 functional areas, including acquisition, financial management, civilian personnel and other areas. NAVAIR uses applications in 18 of these categories and has assigned a FAM to each corresponding category.

The NAVAIR FAMs must provide a list of all NAVAIR applications to the Navy by mid November. The NAVAIR FAMs will then work with Navy FAMs and FAMs from other Navy echelons to complete the reduction of applications.

“Reducing the number of legacy applications is the right strategy for the Navy and NAVAIR,” said Susan Keen, NAVAIR’s chief information officer. “The FAM effort complements our SIGMA enterprise resource planning implementation and our strategy for being more closely aligned with the rest of the Navy.”

In addition to the FAM tasking, legacy applications have become a focal point of the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) deployment, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) initiatives and the Task Force Web effort.

“At NAVAIR, the FAM process is fully integrated with NMCI, ERP and Task Force Web,” said Long. “In fact, we are using data collected during the NMCI transition as a baseline for this effort.”

The FAM team is also using data collected during the year 2000 effort, in which NAVAIR gathered information about its applications to resolve conflicts generated by applications that used a two-digit date format before the year 2000.

The Navy has reported that applications have been reduced from 96,025 on Feb. 1, 2001 to 31,313 on August 28, 2002. To date, NAVAIR has achieved an 85 percent reduction in legacy applications.

For more information, please visit NAVAIR’s Office of the CIO on the Web at https://cio.navair.navy.mil.