However, things weren't 100 percent shipshape: Several days before our site visit, the system experienced a database server outage lasting several hours. When we asked Appian how this could happen, its answer was simple: The provider recommended a fault-tolerant database design to the customer, but the customer decided not to invest in a fault-tolerant database server.

As the big picture unfolded, this became somewhat understandable: There's a definite order of operations and priorities at work here, and NKO is still in its early phases. From a project-management perspective, these priorities are:

• Define the business case: What is NKO's purpose?

• Do it cheap and do it now: This project cannot be expensive, but the team also cannot take a long time to design and deploy the system.

• Measure and track: Have quantifiable measures of success, but not necessarily IT measurements; pick the right measures for the maturity level of the system.

• Build to spec: Build an IT system that allows NKO to focus on the first three objectives without regard to specific technology.

Note that "keep it 100 percent fault tolerant from the beginning" is not among those initial objectives. That's a little hard to swallow, but believe it or not, if the business case is right, a project will not languish and die because of a little downtime. NKO proves this.

The Business Case

NKO is the KM piece of the Sea Warrior initiative, which is a component of Task Force Excel, endorsed by none other than the highest-ranking Naval officer, Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations. A key element of Task Force Excel is to improve the Navy by improving its sailors, specifically by encouraging and fostering pervasive and lifelong learning (see https://wwwa.nko.navy.mil/portal/index.jhtml).

Retired Capt. Fred Bertsch, functional integration manager for the Naval Personnel Development Command (NPDC), is onboard with Clark's transformation strategy, believing it to be robust and appropriate. After all, it's the sailors that make the Navy able to strike at enemies efficiently and effectively. Bertsch says Clark saw a number of paths to transforming the human force.

"He said, 'You don't have to do it by training and education. You can do it by distribution. You can do it by compensation. You can do it by advancement,'" according to Bertch. "He chose to concentrate on training, and I think rightfully so, because a more educated and capable, skilled force would allow us to more rapidly transform the rest of the Navy."

After this decision was made three years ago, naval training was formally reviewed. A team spent about eight months assessing how the process--unchanged since 1907--could be made better. The team looked at best practices in industry as well as the academic world.

The result was a killer app the Navy calls the 5 Vector Model, a career dashboard that tracks a sailor's progress in five important areas of development.

While Lt. Eric Morris, NKO's program manager, is very clear on NKO's technology benefits to the sailor both now and in the future (when video-on-demand training is scheduled to come online), he is also very clear that NKO is an IT-implemented knowledge-management solution, not an IT solution that happens to feature knowledge management.