Lt. Eric Morris, who along with retired Capt. Fred Bertsch sketched out the concept of NKO in February 2002 and now manages the portal's operations, likes to say that NKO "tilts the Navy's vertical structure just a little bit. It lets our leadership see what the sailors think."

It's precisely that concept that had forced Morris and Bertsch into the shadows of the Norfolk, Va., naval base. Their idea was and may still be a threat to some Navy brass. In this culture, the more budget dollars an admiral controls and the more data a unit CIO manages, the more powerful they are. Flatter and more open organizations don't work in their favor, some observers point out. Besides, in the private sector, knowledge management has been known to expose business units that are overmanaged. What if it revealed that the Navy could get by with fewer admirals and commanders?

Put Up or Shut Up

When Morris and Bertsch presented a white paper describing NKO less than a month after their initial brainstorming session, they were met with skepticism and even defiance. They were told that a project like that would require a decade of planning and billions of dollars.

No one would be cutting them a big check to launch a KM portal. Instead, they would have to find any funds they could and produce a prototype. "We decided we have to show them something," Bertsch says. "We have to show them what we mean, because if Jiffy Lube can do this, if the gas station down the street can do this, why can't the United States Navy do this?"

The result was an 18-minute CD-ROM that Morris presented to Admiral Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, at the Pentagon. "At the end of the briefing, he said, 'That's exactly what I want. Go out and make it happen,'" Bertsch says.

It was a limited victory. The naval chief gave his blessing but no dollars. The training unit that Morris and Bertsch are assigned to, the Naval Personnel Development Command (NPDC), would have to fund the portal launch using existing budget lines. Morris and Bertsch scraped together $4.5 million from various training and education budgets over six months, during which time they prepared RFPs and reviewed vendor bids. They also assembled a small group that included Chris Piereman, a retired master chief electronic technician with the Navy and now a contractor, and Capt. James Kantner, a Navy reservist on active duty.

Perhaps the most notable, and surprising, selection was a little-known company called Appian Corp., which would act as the collaboration-software vendor and integrator. (A few Appian developers are always on site in Norfolk; two more are assigned to Saufley Field, the naval education and training center in Pensacola, Fla.; and one is assigned to the Center for Naval Intelligence in Damneck, Va.)

Appian beat out IBM by, among other things, agreeing to buy the hardware--a Sun Microsystems server to run the Oracle database and four Sun Fire 280R systems to run the application servers--on behalf of the Navy. Because there was no money left in this Navy unit's budget for hardware, Appian bundled that cost into the service agreement and will transfer ownership of the systems to the Navy after one year.