Case Study: Can the U.S. Army Pay Soldiers Correctly?

Question 1.
Over the years the Army has been using several separate systems that did not work well with each other, required a lot of manual data entry which resulted in a high percentage of errors. Before 2004 the Army was using the Defense Joint Military Pay System for about 40 years. However, this system needed information from the personnel system, the Regional Level Application Software system, and the two were not well integrated. Manual data entry was required to make any changes in the system which increased the chance of mistakes. It was very difficult to make changes to the system due to its obsolescence. The Army needed a comprehensive, integrated human resources and payroll system. Such a system was under construction since 1998 and its roll out was being constantly delayed. It was noted that the delay was caused by leadership turnover, inconsistent support from senior management as well as by a number of agencies trying to influence the project. The impact of all of these problems was tremendous. Thousands of soldiers were either underpaid or overpaid. Soldiers couldn't easily track mistakes either because their pay often varied due to different entitlements. The Army was wasting a lot of resources trying to fix the mistakes and recover overpayments. The requirements for the new system include complete integration of the payroll and personnel modules, maximum automation, automatic data uploads and user-friendliness.

Question 2.
The Forward Compatible Payroll system was a temporary solution while the Defense Integrated Military Human REsources System was under construction. The FCP was more automated than the previous sytem. Here is how the system worked: a pay administrator uses a Web browser to access the personnel system and review mobilization orders. The mobilization application requests info, such as dates of deployment before setting the pay rate and adding entitlements. After the pay rate is set, the unit commander has to sign off a hard copy of the mobilization order after which the data are transmitted to a Microsoft SQL Server database at the Reserve headquarters. Then the data are uploaded to the local server at a pay processing center where pay records were manually reviewed by staff. Then the data are trasmitted to the payroll system. The process had to be improved to avoid mistakes with adding entitlements and to make the system even more automated to avoid human errors.

Question 3.
When developing and implementing a new information system it is very important that end users and technical specialists work together.TEchnical specialists need to be there to listen to the users concerns . A lot of times this is a big problem. There often are communication difficulties between the users and IT staff. End users find IT people speaking a different language and not understanding each other. So the two parties need to find a way to communicate effectively.