Defense moves to integrate pay systems

An initiative to integrate 79 military pay and personnel systems into one system moved forward Monday when Pentagon officials announced that Northrop Grumman would take the project into its implementation phase.

Once completed, the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System, or DIMHRS, will be a single, fully consolidated personnel system for all the military services, according to Norma St. Claire, director of the Joint Requirements and Integration Office at Defense. DIMHRS will cover 3.1 million military personnel including reserve and National Guard forces, creating a record of service for each service member.

"Military personnel management is far more complex and far-reaching than personnel management in the private sector," St. Claire said. "We have the responsibility of following our service members from the moment they enter the military, essentially for the rest of their lives. Things that happen to them in the military very often result in benefits that they're entitled to after they've left the military."

The new system will "ensure accurate and timely access to information for all authorized users, including the service members themselves," St. Claire said.

The DIMHRS project is being handled in phases and is expected to be rolled out completely by 2006. Over the next few months, Northrop Grumman will hone software developed by California-based PeopleSoft Inc. to help the military branches migrate to the new system.

"It provides an opportunity for the department to provide everyone, most especially the combatant commanders, with much better visibility over what is ultimately the most important resource they have, and that is their people," said David Chu, undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness.

Also, because the final product will be Web-based, military commanders will be able to easily find service members with specific skill sets and be able to access needed information from anywhere.

"It's big step forward," said Capt. Valerie Carpenter, the DIMHRS program manager. "Combat commanders now will have near real-time accurate information on their task force. Every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine will be serviced by DIHMRS."

The Army is expected to begin using the system in a limited fashion by late 2005.

"We will be taking the data from the legacy systems and bringing it in and cleansing it," Carpenter said. "The services will be doing what we call a data cleansing; they'll bring in the data that they currently have, making sure it's accurate and that it's one piece of information for each soldier, sailor, airman and Marine, and it will go onto the common database of DIMHRS."