GIs, officials disagree on effectiveness of AKO - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

GIs, officials disagree on effectiveness of AKO

Soldiers hate AKO. That was clear when Army Times asked users of Army Knowledge Online what they think about the Web portal.

Their frustration was evident in more than 70 e-mails from Army active-duty, civilian and retired users.

The most common complaints:

• AKO is frustratingly slow.

• It has a cluttered interface.

• Its security features are too cumbersome.

• Its search engine is useless.

For many, that adds up to a decision to avoid AKO whenever possible.

Launched in 2001, AKO is the secure gateway for soldiers to access e-mail, file storage, instant messaging and other collaboration tools. It boasts more than 2.33 million unclassified users and more than 123,000 classified users, including active duty, National Guard, Reserve, civilians, contractors, family members and retirees, as well as 350,000 users through the Defense Department’s Defense Knowledge Online, which it hosts.

The system has an annual budget of $67 million and is operated by a team of some 20,000 employees — larger than an Army division.

AKO users said the system has lost relevance for them, that they avoid it in favor of commercial services like Microsoft’s collaborative tool SharePoint, or Google Docs and Gmail, whose usefulness and intuitiveness they would like to see AKO emulate.

“AKO has gone from bad to worse,” wrote Dale Carpenter, a retired major turned contractor. “It’s one of the most poorly designed portals that exists on the Web. … The search engine yields wildly unpredictable results, and useful links, such as to publications and references are buried or nonexistent. There is an art to Web-portal design; AKO represents the entire Army, and not in a good way.”

Army doctrine writer Mike Scully, a retired lieutenant colonel now at Combined Arms Directorate on Fort Leavenworth, Kan., complained that AKO’s collaborative tools are “amazingly slow.” For doctrine writing, which requires working together across agencies and services, AKO’s cumbersome, multistep permissions system makes it a “relic” and “a last resort.”

“I’ll tell you, our primary tool is SharePoint,” Scully said. SharePoint has “a good version-control system that allows us to make adjustments as necessary. I don’t know of anyone now — AKO is the last thing you want to use to do that, and at one time it used to be the thing.”

In an interview with Army Times, Gary Winkler, the Army’s top official in charge of AKO, defended the portal as well-used and the best product created, maintained and upgraded with limited resources. He said AKO remains relevant with more than 350,000 unique logins, and 800,000 to 900,000 hits each day, adding that with so many users, “you can’t keep everybody happy.”

“There are a lot of people using the heck out of it, including myself. I’ve been on it exclusively at work, for everything I do, since March, and I’m moving my whole organization of 20,000 people to it,” said Winkler, the program executive officer for enterprise information systems at Fort Belvoir, Va. “We’re wringing some of the warts out of it, but we’re certainly operational.”

AKO’s program office, which polls 20,000 users each week, reported 78 percent of users said they couldn’t live without AKO e-mail. Winkler did not know the ratio of positive to negative responses from recent polls, but said “a lot of it is positive, with suggestions for improvement.”

“We’re always looking for feedback and ways we can tweak it and ways we can make it better, but of course we’re limited by funding,” he said. “When people are unhappy, we really take it to heart, but with so many users, we don’t want to break something that works for the majority, only to fix something for the few who are unhappy.”

Any changes must be filtered through AKO’s massive governing body, the 40-member Army CIO Executive Board, which includes members from each Army command; all headquarters organizations; the Reserve and the National Guard. It is chaired by the Army chief information officer, G6. (Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson retired as CIO earlier this month and his deputy, Mike Kreiger, is acting CIO.)

Winkler said the board, which sets the requirements and resources for AKO, has funded AKO at $67 million this year, “the bare minimum,” with room for some modest improvements. “To the extent that we can work a little more efficiently, stretch our dollars further, we’ve put out some improvements,” he said.

The Army is apparently moving in another direction, at least for e-mail. The CIO announced efforts last month to move e-mail services to a cloud-based e-mail hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency. The plan, billed as a cost-saver in the long run, is to provide soldiers with a single e-mail account and network identity by September.

AKO, however, will continue to function as a repository of Army knowledge, data, applications and the global address list, Winkler said. “As far as I’m concerned, AKO stands as a viable capability even if DISA does e-mail as an enterprise capability,” he said. “Until the DISA effort stands up, is functioning and viable, AKO is it.”

One of the most common complaints about AKO is the security, which some users said is such a hassle, they avoid AKO altogether. Logging in is simple with DoD’s ubiquitous ID, the Common Access Card, and a peripheral card reader. Without such a card, users must remember a complex password and answer three security questions.

Family members and retirees aren’t issued a CAC. Steve Broussard, a retired lieutenant colonel in Orlando, Fla., said it’s frustrating when the system questions him and permits his inbox to fill with spam.

“In a word, it takes forever,” said Broussard, now a defense contractor using AKO for research. “I have no problem with a secure password ... but then you’ve got to answer three questions. Give me a break.”

Maj. Jason B. Nicholson, a foreign area officer assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, said he is nine hours from the closest CAC reader. He once mistyped his password, was locked out, and couldn’t remember the correct format for a security question about his birthday.

Nicholson gave up on AKO in favor of Gmail, and so did his wife, who is a computer forensics expert. She told him that AKO’s security measures wouldn’t stop a determined hacker.

“AKO offers some incredible capabilities for soldiers and their families, and it’s a tool for them to control their access [to information],” Nicholson said. “But what in fact the Army’s doing is pushing people out because it’s so difficult and cumbersome, and they’ve ceded control.”

Winkler said AKO’s security requirements and features, though unpopular, are necessary to protect vast amounts of sensitive data. What’s more, the security requirements are not under his control, but that of U.S. Army Cyber Command, under the U.S. Cyber Command and U.S. Strategic Command.

“There’s not a darn thing we can do about that,” he said.

Winkler said the simplest solution for users is to buy a CAC reader — Army Times found one brand on sale for $13 — and the Army has bought 1 million readers, he said.

“It’s a challenge, but they’re so cheap, people just need to do their job and make them available, as opposed to compromising everything on AKO and compromising the entire network,” Winkler said. “It’s just a matter of following policy and making sure commanders distribute them to their units.”

Users like Spc. Emily Brand said AKO is just too slow.

Brand, who works at an admin shop on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., processes and tracks leave forms, evaluations and other documents through the MyForms feature, and finds it “more time-consuming than any other system.”

The first MyForms page takes several minutes to load, she said, and from there it only lets her upload one form at a time. Leave forms take 15 to 30 minutes to upload, so when she processes 150 of them just before the holidays, it’s like molasses.

“In the Army, it’s always got to get done now,” Brand said. “Why was the Army culture of ‘go, go, go’ not taken into consideration with this program?”

Winkler countered that almost all AKO logins take less than six seconds, and suggested that the local network, MyForms or the network hosting it might have the problem.

“If it’s not working efficiently or effectively on a scale like that, that application needs to be changed or modified or updated,” he said. “If it’s a ‘handshake’ issue between AKO and the application, then AKO engineers will get with that application’s engineers and work it out.”

AKO is the gatekeeper for more than 600 applications and components like MyForms, but these applications are not necessarily under AKO’s direct purview or even resident on AKO’s servers at Fort Belvoir, Winkler said.

MyForms is on the Army Publishing Directorate’s servers, medical records belong to the Army Medical Department, personnel management information to Human Resources Command, and finances to the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management & Comptroller).

“AKO is your link into those,” he said, “but AKO can’t really impact how fast those systems do their thing.”

Carpenter, who lives in Woodbridge, Va., said AKO packs pages with items he doesn’t need and makes it hard to find items he does. He said he would prefer a dedicated tab for publications like field manuals instead of resorting to AKO’s search engine, which he and other users said was hit or miss.

Winkler defended the interface as emulating the design of other popular websites and conceded that improving AKO’s search function has long been a challenge. AKO doesn’t search the Internet, it searches its own intranet for data posted by users. If those users opt not to share that data, it will be invisible to the search engine.

“If they’re expecting what they’re used to, like a Google search or a Yahoo search, they’re going to be disappointed, because it’s just not the same thing,” Winkler said.

As for individual features, Winkler said requirements can be funded by the Army or individual organizations. For example, the Fires Knowledge Network is funded by the Artillery School at Fort Sill, Okla., and the CIO last year funded the addition of Workflow, which is a business process management application.

Carpenter’s publications tab would probably have to be funded by Training and Doctrine Command.

“It’s a question of whether TRADOC wants to pay for something or they want Army Headquarters to fund it,” Winkler said. “If TRADOC thinks there’s a better investment for them to fund it, they’ll fund it. But TRADOC may have higher priorities.”

Of course, not everyone hates AKO. Some users said AKO was a good idea that was poorly executed, and others offered it qualified praise, saying they wanted some of its must useful features enhanced.

Reserve Lt. Col. Jon Thompson, an Illinois ROTC instructor, was among those who said they like AKO’s directory, and would like the ability to call up organizational trees, so that he can find a person based on a job title when the name is unknown.

“Right now, it’s very difficult to call up a unit Web page,” he said. “We had a cadet who was trying to go into intelligence for an Army Reserve unit. I was trying to find the point of contact, the S1, and I couldn’t find anything. That was the most recent frustration that I had.”

Reserve 2nd Lt. Ramiro Garza III of Houston praised AKO as a portal to personnel records, and leave and earning statements, but said AKO needs to streamline the “links on top of links” and focus on the necessities: HR functions, training, medical, and communications.

“This is truly a case where less would be more,” Garza said. “No doubt the Army has created and maintained what other Fortune 500 companies and large law firms are already providing to their clients. Keep up the great work and let’s make it better.”

Winkler said he is open to all the constructive criticism AKO gets.

“We hear you,” he said. “We’re making it better as much as we can within the funding constraints.”