NMCI poll shows slight increase in user satisfaction

A quarterly customer satisfaction rating for the Navy Marine Corps Intranet project continues to move steadily upward, and some areas reached levels high enough to allow the project's contractor to earn its first incentive payments.

Statistics released by program officials on Friday show that for the second quarter of 2005, overall NMCI user satisfaction improved two percentage points to 76 percent and that on the the questions that determine the contractor's incentives, satisfaction increased from 76 percent in March 2005 to 78 percent. NMCI officials would not release the survey's questions, stating that it would compromise the integrity of the survey.

Since two organizations--Commander, Naval Installations and Naval Education and Training Command--rated the program at the 85 percent satisfaction level, the contractor, EDS, will earn incentive payments for the organizations' seats in the new system as of June 30, 2005.

Civilian and military users of the system have expressed dissatisfaction with the NMCI project, and others have cast doubt on the validity of its customer service ratings. Polling experts, for example, have said that the policy of withholding the release of the survey's questions, makes results difficult to validate.

The June survey was randomly dispersed among 118,000 NMCI users and 18,562 questionnaires were completed, a 15.7 percent response rate. The Marine Corps user rating rose from 69 percent in March 2005--the first time the survey was conducted--to 74 percent in June.

Survey takers were most satisfied with the professionalism of EDS personnel, giving them an 88 percent rating; they were least satisfied with their own ability to make changes, which received a 61 percent ranking. But the category of user control showed the biggest increase in satisfaction, from 56 percent in March.

"The slow but continuing rise in NMCI customer satisfaction ratings is encouraging and reflects the hard work of our integrated Navy, Marine Corps and EDS team," said Rear Adm. James B. Godwin III, the top NMCI official. "We must remain focused and vigilant as we continue implementing and improving NMCI for our customers."

NMCI also announced that anti-spam software recently was installed across the system and the ability to remotely log into the system using high-speed access was made available to a certain number of users. A a full rollout is planned for the next few months.

Longtime users of NMCI should expect a "technology refresh" later this year and NMCI computers will be upgraded to Windows XP.