The Department of the Navy has designated 10 enterprise services under its Innovation Adoption Kit (IAK), with the latest, GenAI.mil, designated to Horizon 1 – a designation reserved for fully deployed enterprise services, according to Navy Chief Technology Officer Justin Fanelli.
The IAK is designed to accelerate the transition of pilot programs into full implementation while reducing fragmented network development. The effort emphasizes shared engineering solutions that can scale across the service and enable broader divestment of redundant systems.
Central to the framework is an “investment horizons” model that organizes technology initiatives into four stages: Horizon 3 for scouting and pilot programs, Horizon 2 for scaling emerging capabilities, Horizon 1 for fully deployed enterprise services, and Horizon 0 for retiring outdated systems.
During the Sea Air Space Conference in Washington D.C. on Monday, Fanelli said the Horizon 1 designation for GenAI.mil followed a rapid evaluation and reflects an effort to standardize adoption and measure impact across use cases.
Fanelli also said the Navy is promoting use of its enterprise services while emphasizing measurable outcomes, supported by centralized training and adoption tracking. With GenAI.mil, hundreds of use cases have already been recorded, helping identify the most impactful applications for broader deployment.
He did not disclose specifics about the other nine designated services.
According to Fanelli, the service aims to continue building momentum in the coming months by expanding enterprise services, increasing divestments, and reducing the time required to move ideas into operational use.
But shutting down legacy systems remains a persistent challenge due to the scale and complexity of Navy IT infrastructure, which includes thousands of applications, multiple networks, and more than 100 data environments, Fanelli said.
One effort supporting the Navy’s enterprise services push is Operation Cattle Drive, a 2020 initiative aimed at eliminating redundant IT platforms and reinvesting savings into more scalable capabilities, Fanelli said. He framed the effort as the divestment side of the Navy’s enterprise strategy: once a service proves it is the strongest option in its category, the goal is to move users to that platform and retire overlapping systems.
“Enterprise services are complemented by [Operation Cattle Drive],” Fanelli said. “Cattle Drive is when something is better than everything else in its category, then how do we divest and get rid of this?”
Fanelli said the effort aligns with the Navy’s investment horizon model by helping move successful tools into broader enterprise use while phasing out duplicative legacy systems.
Navy to reduce network environments by year-end
Scott St. Pierre, director of enterprise networks and cybersecurity at the Department of the Navy, also announced during the conference that the service aims to reduce its number of network environments by roughly 25%, to about 100 by the end of the year.
This push is the latest step in a decadeslong consolidation effort that began in the late 1990s, when the Navy operated more than 6,000 largely disconnected network environments. That total dropped to about 1,200 by 2010 and now stands at roughly 133, St. Pierre explained.
“The Navy’s major priority right now is really a modernization of our information ecosystem, both the afloat and the shore,” St. Pierre said, emphasizing the current focus on completing the “most complex phase of the effort” while improving efficiency and reducing costs.
St. Pierre said the remaining environments present technical challenges because they are tightly integrated, requiring careful analysis before they can be consolidated or migrated.
“What we’re left with are those really gnarly, challenging environments that are tightly coupled,” St. Pierre said. “It takes quite a bit to deconstruct those, figure out what we need, what we don’t need, and then start moving those to the cloud.”
While some systems will remain on premises, cloud migration is expected to play a central role in the Navy’s strategy.