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Greater efficiency with less personnel |
The breakup of the Soviet Union has meant many things to many people, including reductions in military spending throughout most of Europe. To many defense organizations, however, this peace dividend has a down side. It means budget and personnel cuts.
The Royal Netherlands Navy, which has the most extensive computing infrastructure of the country's three defense services, is no exception. Defense reductions, coupled with an internal need for reorganization, have resulted in a need for greater efficiency with less personnel and a way to support a changing navy operational structure that was becoming increasingly decentralized.
Rather than taking small initial steps to cope with these changes, one military official, Commander Geurt Jalink, decided to completely revamp his organization -- the navy's Center for Automation of Business Information Systems (CABIS) -- and its way of doing business. He changed CABIS into an independent business unit, redefined tasks, decentralized support, and established a consistent set of procedures. In the process, Commander Jalink began implementing a client/server computer architecture -- using Digital's DEChub product family and POLYCENTER-- that supports these changes and allows for future reorganization in a fluid environment.
"One thing is absolutely clear. A good and flexible network, including network management, is essential to meet the new requirements," says Commander Jalink. "This is the real asset of the organization."
The navy has purchased networking equipment from Digital, including 50 DEChub 900 MultiSwitches, and has successfully installed them in 25 sites, including the country's main naval base at Den Helder, the admiralty board and support organizations in The Hague, the electronic maintenance workshop in Oegstgeest, schools and naval intelligence offices in Amsterdam, and in the Caribbean.
Oskam, who as a civilian working for a private company, BSO Origin, is helping to design, implement, and run the navy's new network. In addition to staffing and maintaining the ships and accounting for spare and reserve parts on board ships or in warehouses, the network also supports general office applications and some Computer Aided Design -- both of which are being migrated from a mainframe to a distributed environment.
Although the network is not transmitting mission-critical defense secrets, it does support mission-essential functions. At the ship repair hall in Den Helder, for instance, the workers repairing and maintaining the navy's fleet take their orders from a computer terminal.
"We have hundreds of people working at the ship repair hall receiving their orders from a computer terminal. They always have one day of work orders in advance," explains Oskam. "Reliability is important to us because we are running the operation here and managing the whole network over the Netherlands with a very small staff of people. We can't afford to send persons out to repair things too often. We don't have the manpower to do that."
The navy has computer experts in the five or six sites with large existing VAX clusters. But the other 20 sites have no computer experts. "The primary business of the Marines is defense, not managing networks," says Oskam. "If something breaks down, you have to phone somebody and be able to give them quite simple directives."
Says Commander Jalink of the overall project: "Organizationally it was a success. The reduction of network support personnel from 44 to 26 had no impact on the effectiveness of the operations, even though the total number of users more than doubled and is still growing. The organization has become more scalable and flexible. Job satisfaction within our organization increased. Normal office hours have become standard, and internal competition has turned into quality enhancement."
Winning with Digital - March 1996
Spokesperson:
Commander Geurt Jalink
Royal Netherlands Navy
The Netherlands
Updated: Thursday, September 12, 1996