Summary: 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.
