NSA COMPUTER UPGRADE - [The Wall Street Journal, B1.] What does it take to send an e-mail to all 38,000 employees at the government's premier computing center, the supersecret National Security Agency? "An act of God," says the agency's director since 1999, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden. The NSA, he discovered to his chagrin last year, has 68 e-mail systems. He has three computers on his desk - none of which can communicate with the others. To deal with those frustrations, Hayden is now plunging into one of the U.S. government's biggest information-technology outsourcing deals ever. More than 15 companies, including AT&T, Computer Sciences, IBM, General Dynamics and OAO, have formed three teams to compete for a contract set to be valued at as much as $5 billion over 10 years. Requests for proposals went out last week; the winner will be chosen by July. Project Groundbreaker, as the job is called, will be a curious venture by any measure. The winning consortium will take over running the NSA's office-technology infrastructure, including thousands of desktop computers and a Medusa-like tangle of software and internal communications systems. Hayden describes the current setup as "anarchic, convoluted and complex." It is a holdover from the days when the NSA, for security reasons, was broken into dozens of sealed-off compartments. Each bought its own computers, developed its own software and built its own networks, intentionally cut off from the rest of the organization. Hayden now wants to open the place up, at least internally. Whoever wins the Groundbreaker contract will have to meld the current mess into one seamless network, so that for the first time the agency can move around top-secret files as any company would, but without fear of an external security breach. If Groundbreaker succeeds, industry experts predict it could set off a wave of other big outsourcing deals within the federal government. Likely next candidates include the departments of Energy and Defense, and even the Central Intelligence Agency. "This will set the standard for how all similar deals proceed," says Thomas Robinson, president of CSC's Defense Group, which is leading one team that also includes General Dynamics and Verizon. The leaders of the other two competing consortia are AT&T and OAO.