By Rebecca Castellano
USAG Stuttgart Public Affairs
The Defense Civilian Personnel Data System (DCPDS) will be unavailable August 4-12 as it moves from its current hosting site at the Denver Data Center, to the Oracle Cloud infrastructure. The move is intended to increase efficiency across the DOD by combining all services into one cloud while also reducing costs on server maintenance.
The DCPDS portal provides access to several sites like HR, MyBiz and MyWorkplace which send updates to personnel records via the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS), the Defense Civilian Pay system (DCPS) and the Automated Time, Attendance and Production System (ATAAPS). Updates or changes to DOD civilian personnel files via these sites will not be available during the outage.
Tony Whitehouse, Stuttgart’s Civilian Personnel Advisory Center chief said that while the dates have been intentionally scheduled around the pay period to minimize disruptions, pay changes relating to promotions and awards or travel or living quarter allowances may be delayed.
While little impact is expected to personnel action processing, new and relocating employees may face some challenges when applying for CAC cards or ATAAPS accounts.
“In order for a new or relocated employee to show up in DEERS and to be issued a CAC card, DEERS has to get that information from DCPDS, which will not be updated,” said Whitehouse who added that they are working with mission partners to modify arrival dates around the outage when possible.
“If we can make their arrival date effective as of Sunday instead of Monday that gives us an extra day of processing but if they’re unable to get it by Tuesday then they’re going to have to wait until after Aug. 12.”
According to Whitehouse, there is a chance the updates could be done before the 12th or obstacles could come up that would extend the downtime.
“We just want people to be informed in advanced and be able to manage expectations,” said Whitehouse.
“We’re hoping for perfection but we’re asking for patience during this time.”