Army Automation

Decisions Needed on SIDPERS-3 Before Further Development Gao ID: IMTEC-90-66 September 5, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Army's development of the Standard Installation/Division Personnel System III (SIDPERS-3), focusing on the: (1) Department of Defense's (DOD) Major Automated Information Systems Review Committee's (MAISRC) review of SIDPERS-3; (2) Army's actions to evaluate alternative personnel systems; and (3) Army's use of Ada computer language.

GAO found that: (1) MAISRC raised significant concerns about whether SIDPERS-3 was the Army's best program alternative during its September 1989 review of the system; (2) in spite of those concerns, MAISRC allowed the Army to continue SIDPERS-3 design and development; (3) the Army did not adequately address such MAISRC concerns as its use of alternative systems and Ada language; (4) in fiscal year 1990, the Army paid a contractor about $6 million to continue technical design and software development of SIDPERS-3 based on a development approach MAISRC questioned; (5) the Army did not consider alternative systems because it believed that SIDPERS-3 was an acceptable concept; (6) the Army's SIDPERS-3 cost estimate study did not include all of the necessary support costs and excluded certain hardware costs totalling about $102 million; and (7) an Army study lacked empirical data on Ada's costs and benefits, but still concluded that Ada was the most efficient, effective, and economical alternative.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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