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	Director, Operational Test & Evaluation
	FY98 Annual Report

SYSTEM DESCRIPTION & CONTRIBUTION TO JOINT VISION 2010

The Defense Civilian Personnel Data System (DCPDS) will provide the software application tools and the requisite hardware to support civilian personnel mission requirements for DoD. Its genesis was the regionalization of DoD personnel data centers, with the consolidation of personnel service centers. DCPDS complements regionalization in that the automated tools it provides will facilitate the expected decrease in the personnelist to customer service ratio (from 1:50 to 1:100).

Some aspect of DCPDS will be installed at each level of the hierarchical personnel command chain. The main focus of DCPDS is the Regional Service Centers and Customer Support Units. They will receive the full DCPDS hardware and software. Other lower levels will receive a portion of the system suite commensurate with the scope of their operations and the willingness of their respective services to commit funds towards the project.

The basic design of the system is a client-server architecture. Data entered into the system at the Customer Support Units will be collated and collected into a local data base before being sent on to the Regional Service Centers. The data base of record for each service's region (and for each DoD agency) will reside at their respective Regional Service Center. The Civilian Personnel Management Service will keep a DoD enterprise data base for survey purposes.

Since regionalization is occurring concurrently with the development of DCPDS, it was necessary as a stopgap measure to develop software to streamline certain personnel functions for the regionalized environment. These personnel process improvement functions include:

• Training assignments

• Job position development

• Major personnel actions

• Ad hoc data base search and query.

DCPDS supports information superiority envisioned in Joint Vision 2010 by providing seamless integration of civilian personnel information within the Defense Department.

The four personnel process improvement functions, which are also known as the interim DCPDS system, underwent an OA in FY96. The OA indicated that the personnel process improvements were not being employed by the personnelists in their day-to-day activities. As a result, little useful data could be collected as to their performance. It was concluded that the sites had not implemented the personnel process improvements for a variety of reasons including:

• Insufficient training.

• Inadequate business process planning.

• Immature software.

DOT&E recommended that the implementation plans and training program be improved and that another OA be conducted in FY97. Hardware buys to implement the personnel process improvements, except for those necessary to ensure the continuation of the separate personnel center regionalization program, were put on hold until the personnel process improvements were shown to be operationally effective and suitable.

An OA on the interim suite of personnel process improvements was conducted at several operating DCPDS sites involving the Services (Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps) and other non-Service organizations (such as Washington Headquarters Service) from January 13-31, 1997. The OA focused on the interim system's ability to support civilian personnel operations in a regionalized environment. The OA also evaluated the progress in the developmental effort to produce the objective modernized DCPDS.

The results indicate that the personnel process improvements were being used profitably by most of the sites surveyed. In general, the personnelists found them superior to the legacy systems in that they made their jobs easier to perform by automating tasks that were once done manually. However, the OA also found that effective use of the personnel process improvements depended to a larger degree on the development of a strong infrastructure, including level of resources and time devoted to implementing the revised business practices that the interim system requires for improved productivity. The interim system generally performed better at those sites that put more resources towards implementing the interim system.

The OA also showed that there is a moderate risk that the objective DCPDS will not be delivered on time and ready for OT&E. Deficiencies were found in the areas of programmatic documentation, traceability of operational requirements through system design documentation into the production software, and the degree of completion of software development as of the date of the OA.

During FY98, T&E activities were limited to developmental and technical testing. This activity included software unit testing and integration testing, in which the system's end-to-end performance was tested in a laboratory environment, and the formal Software Qualification Test (SQT), the last DT prior to OT. Representatives from the components participated in both the integration testing and the SQT.

At the time this was written, SQT was ongoing. An evaluation of the fitness of the system to continue on to formal OT has not been made. The Qualification Operational Test and Evaluation for the objective DCPDS is scheduled for early 1999. The focus of the test will be on system performance, data accuracy, data synchronization, interoperability, information security, reliability, maintainability, and availability.

Based on the results of the OA on the interim system, there is a high likelihood that the success of the target system will depend heavily on:

• The ability of the user sites to formulate realistic business process implementation plans.

• The availability of resources, including people, training programs, and hardware infrastructure to implement the DCPDS.