Air Force awaits OK on personnel records systems upgrade
APRIL 17—The Air Force Personnel Center is awaiting approval from the Defense Department to replace the service's legacy civilian and military personnel systems.The center wants to retire the old systems by next March, but the transition will be a challenge, said officials of the center at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas.
APRIL 17The Air Force Personnel Center is awaiting approval from the Defense Department to replace the service's legacy civilian and military personnel systems.
The center wants to retire the old systems by next March, but the transition will be a challenge, said officials of the center at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas.
The center had expected to receive a decision on March 28 that would let it begin full-scale deployment of the joint Defense Civilian Personnel Data System (DCPDS), said Col. Thomas Starkovich, the center's director of personnel data systems.
A decision is expected any day, said Harold J. Densberger, the service's program manager for the civilian data system.
The systems replacement requires the approval of Maj. Gen. William A. "Ken" Peck Jr., commander of the Air Force Operational Test Center at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. Then Arthur L. Money, assistant secretary of Defense for command, control, communications and intelligence, would need to sign off on it, Densberger said.
But Peck took over as commander just this month and hasn't yet read the final report.
Lockheed Martin Corp. will operate the DCPDS once the center receives the green light to deploy the system, Starkovich said.
The service plans to move from character-based Cobol applications that mainly run on antiquated mainframes from Bull HN Information Systems Inc. of Billerica, Mass. DCPDS, which uses Oracle Human Resources 10.7 and an Oracle7 relational database management system, will run under HP-UX 11 on Hewlett-Packard 9000 servers.
The center's officials originally wanted to take its pair of Bull mainframes, which handle base-level personnel transactions, offline by Dec. 31. They now expect to postpone until March 31 the shuttering of the systems, one for 850,000 million civilian records and one for 1.7 million military records. It is complex shifting from distributed personnel systems to centralized systems, Densberger said.
Under the separate Military Modernization Program, the Air Force plans to replace the system that handles personnel transactions for its active-duty members, National Guard, dependents, reservists and retirees. The center intends to use a comparable Oracle and HP platform for these records.