Oklahoma DPS Addresses Slowdown of State ID Systems

The Oklahoma Department of Public Safety (DPS) announced today technical issues causing slowdowns in the state’s new driver license software have been identified and dramatically improved. Since March 1, the system has averaged over a 95% overall efficiency. These improvements were accomplished in a coordinated effort between DPS, the Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES) and state vendor, IDEMIA.

“DPS has introduced several new monitoring capabilities into the platform that will allow us to proactively respond to any future issues,” said John Scully, Commissioner of DPS. “But because REAL ID requires several new rigorous identification certifications, it’s understandable that the process for obtaining an identity card takes longer.”

While slowdowns began in late January, the root cause of system outages remained unidentified until recently. OMES has been leading system performance investigation efforts with DPS since early February.

“The regularly high traffic exposed two critical errors within the D360 system,” said Steven Harpe, Director of OMES. “The outages and slowdowns were traced to a higher-than-expected amount of traffic that exposed two issues in the system.”

“According to our analysis, one contributor to the system’s sustained drag occurred when a high volume of reports were run. Every time this occurred, it put a strain on the system resulting in other programs backing up behind them,” said Matthew Thompson, Senior Vice President, Civil Identity for North America at IDEMIA. “IDEMIA and OMES were able to migrate the reports to a secondary database, resulting in a marked improvement in the processing times. In addition to this processing blockage, the teams have been able to optimize a processing step to improve performance by up to 90 percent.”

Under the leadership of Commissioner Scully, DPS has implemented enhanced communication with tag agencies to ensure greater understanding of how the D360 system can be utilized. DPS has also extended business hours for customer appointments, opening evening and Saturday opportunities at many locations.

“We understand this situation continues to be frustrating for the public who have faced delays in getting their REAL IDs. I ask for continued patience as we work to identify ways to better serve our customers,” said Scully. “As we all recover from the pandemic and return to normal, we are also continuously working on installing advanced technology that will be able to make all our citizen services more secure and efficient.”