Major upgrades by Lockheed Martin to the Department of Defense's civilian personnel system computer software have resulted in a dramatic reduction in transaction times, increased reliability and future improved security, company officials reported.

Lockheed Martin is under contract to DoD's Civilian Personnel Management Service to maintain the Defense Civilian Personnel Data System (DCPDS), the largest human resources transaction processing and information system in the world. In 2003 the system was migrated to a custom web-based version of Oracle's(R) human resources software prior to the annual 2004 mass salary increase for civilian employees in January.

"The results were remarkable," said Darrell Graddy, vice president of Applications Development and Maintenance Solutions for Lockheed Martin Information Technology. "Update accuracy was on target, and system performance far exceeded expectations."

In previous years, computing runtimes for an annual civilian pay increase had taken days to accomplish. In 2004, runtimes were down to hours. The entire process for all of DoD took one weekend, permitting normal DCPDS customer work to resume the following Monday morning. Where officials had predicted that the pay increases across Federal government might take months, DoD employees received their increases within the pay period cycle.

Since January, runtimes on other civilian pay actions have also been greatly reduced. On March l, a retroactive 1 percent pay action for 13,000 employees took less than eight hours instead of two to three days. When processing special actions involving special categories of personnel, such as Non-Appropriated Fund employees, Wage Grade workers or Local Nationals, the system has experienced similar results.

Availability of the DCPDS servers is measured against the scheduled uptime, and the results are reported each month. The system has proven to be extremely reliable, with availability exceeding 99.5 percent. For those times a user needs assistance, the DCPDS Help Desk provides service 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"Partnering with our CPMS customer, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard were key to successful Oracle 11i migration," Graddy said. "So was the exhaustive preparation and planning. The effort followed several years of planning and preparation. It required more than six months of testing, 4,000 Lockheed Martin code changes, and modification by Oracle Federal of more than 200 forms, 800 reports, 50 menus and 20 code libraries."

Nineteen sites worldwide were migrated to the new version through use of the government Non-classified (But Sensitive) Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet), requiring distribution of millions of lines of software code.

Soon after the Oracle 11i migration, Lockheed Martin began working toward upgraded system security. The company developed a new Public Key-Enabled software application that ensures the system will work with the DoD Common Access Card and Public Key Infrastructure. When users sign on, the software validates their identities, as is now required by DoD. This enhanced security feature was implemented in the production DCPDS system on August 15, 2004, and is ready for operation as the DoD users install Common Access Card equipment.

In February, DCPDS was subjected to two days of security testing conducted by the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC). The test was successful, and in June 2004, DCPDS received notification of JITC certification, becoming the first DoD enterprise system to be certified.

Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin employs about 130,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture and integration of advanced technology systems, products and services. The corporation reported 2003 sales of $31.8 billion.

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http://www.lockheedmartin.com/.

SOURCE: Lockheed Martin