It's not just a job

Pentagon officials rely on SAS® Intelligence for policy decisions

The Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) formed within the U.S. Department of Defense in the mid-1970s during a time of geopolitical upheaval and domestic uncertainty. The Vietnam War had just ended. Soldiers were coming home and re-entering civilian life in an economy that was shifting into peacetime mode. And the era of an all-volunteer military was just beginning in the United States.

Such far-reaching political, social and economic transitions brought infinite questions about their impact on national security as well as on the lives of soldiers, veterans and the Pentagon's civilian employees. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Reserve Affairs demanded answers, giving rise to the DMDC.

The data center is responsible for collecting as much information as possible on Defense Department personnel, including active duty, reservists, military retirees, and their dependents, as well as DOD civilian employees and contractors. The data center also collects information on active duty accessions and separation data. All this data is used to provide management information services on personnel issues to the defense community.

DMDC typically has information coming from 400 different data sources, in different formats, with different coding.

From Raw Data to Intelligence in No Time
With SAS, the DMDC turns data into information through:

• Data access - Reading data in any format, from any kind of file, including variable-length records, binary files, free-formatted data and even files with messy or missing data.
• Data management - Building Web sites where users query through a point-and-click process; building, saving and running queries without needing to be familiar with Structured Query Language (SQL) or SAS software syntax. SAS is used to populate the data bases and tables used.
• Data analysis - Computing correlations and other measures of association as well as multi-way cross-tabulations and inferential statistics.
• Report presentation - Producing reports that range from a simple listing of a data set to customized reports of complex relationships. Many reports require only a few SAS statements and no programming at all.

22 Million People, One Solution
SAS is commonly used in conjunction with the 22 million record files of people eligible for various Defense Department or Department of Veteran's Affairs benefits, including medical and dental coverage and Montgomery GI Bill benefits, which provides education and other assistance to former soldiers. Questions range from a request for the average age of enlisted personnel serving on aircraft carriers to a request for a study on the quality of individuals entering the military since 1971. These requests can come from most anywhere: Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon's planning and operations staff – even the public.

"At any time, our division of 50 people will have 250 different projects to which we're trying to respond as quickly as possible," says Michael Dove, chief of DMDC's management information and analysis division. "Some questions take five minutes; some may take six months or longer."

DMDC formerly used 20 different internally generated software programs to handle the various projects and requests. Now, DMDC does that work with SAS.

On a typical day, Dove's office will receive numerous e-mails or phone calls from someone in the Pentagon who needs an answer "yesterday." A typical example of a question lately is: How many civilian employees working for the Defense Department are serving in the military reserves and could be leaving their jobs because they're going to be called for service?

SAS helps the DMDC answer such questions, thanks to tremendous file-matching capabilities and robust analytics.

The analyst assigned to the request uses SAS to easily pull data from large files on a mainframe or server, download the information into Excel, analyze it, and then reply to the request in spreadsheet form via e-mail.

DMDC can turn these around from user question to data in their hands in about half an hour and typically the agency is dealing with anywhere from 1 million to 20 million records.

Matching large sets of files is crucial to some of the DMDC's most important work. For example, SAS enables the group's participation in Project Mongoose, which ferrets out fraud in government financial systems. The Department of Defense has 135 financial systems that pay personnel and contractors. The DMDC collects and matches all the files to make sure no duplicate billing is occurring and to make sure the same personnel and contractors aren't getting paid for the same work from two or more centers. All those things are done in SAS.

Flexible, Robust, Easy to Learn
SAS works well on a number of levels, especially its ability to manipulate tremendous amounts of data and turn around requests in virtually no time. SAS is also easy to learn, which is advantageous since the DMDC's new hires come from various backgrounds.

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