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| Ephraim Feig |
Social Security recently did a major reshuffling of its information technology workforce. In the process Dr. Ephraim Feig, who was the Associate Chief Information Officer for Vision and Strategy, left. Apparently, Feig had produced a plan for modernizing Social Security's information technology systems. That plan was not approved by Social Security management. Reading between the lines, it appears that Feig took this anything but gracefully and either quit or was let go as a result. Feig has posted his complaints and his plan online. As best I can tell, one of the major sources of disagreement is that Feig believes that Social Security's planned new national data center is unnecessary. He recommends rebuilding Social Security's information technology systems from the ground up in a completely different way that he describes in only the most general terms. Here are some quotes from his plan (emphasis added):
There is no evidence that the quality of SSA’s [Social Security Administration's] services is significantly improving because of IT [Information Technology] investments in the past decade; there are areas where we know that customer satisfaction is actually down (customer satisfaction with our 800-number phone service dropped significantly). ...
SSA has gotten to the point where the more it invests in IT improvements the less efficient it becomes. In the past eleven years, SSA spent on IT a total of $4.1 Billion above the baseline (the average IT spending during the 1990’s), but it has gotten a lot less than that in return. ...
There are numerous reasons why SSA has not investigated truly modern alternative architectures. The first is that it is comfortable with what it has and scared of changing. There is good reason to be scared of big changes; historically, most have either failed or turned out to cost a lot more than originally anticipated. ...
SSA likes to view its enterprise as very large and complex. This justifies its requests for larger and larger budgets and also emboldens it to claim that it is efficient. SSA brags about new highs in daily transactions. It is not in the Agency’s DNA to try to simplify its processes and to reconsider its enterprise as relatively simple. The reality is that, when it comes to transactional IT, compared to modern large enterprises, SSA is moderate. ...
Our approach to modernization at SSA is entrepreneurial; we design and build a modern system from the ground up, and we transition to it, gradually retiring the old.
I do not understand IT well enough to evaluate Feig's plan but I have to be sympathetic with Social Security management. As Feig acknowledges, Social Security has been burned repeatedly with expensive IT projects that did not work. A complete rebuilding of Social Security's IT systems from scratch based upon only the vaguest of plans would have to be a hard sell.
9 comments:
I suspect Feig's assessment is much more accurate than SSA will admit. I spent 37 years in field offices and saw too many half-hearted attempts to implement technology to improve the work and the service.
Too often SSA seemed to use an approach best called "yesterday's technology for tomorrow's needs."
Here is an example for onoe simple action that can result is myriad service and public relations problems: an SSA employee can change a beneficiary's address via keyboard entry but that change is not automatic--it happens only after a nightly "run" of all the computer transactions nationwide. If the employee mistyped the address that mistake does not appear anywhere for at least 24 hours, often longer depending upon the timing of the run. If the change "edits" the system notifies the employee in the same untimely fashion. And since those edits often arrive in printed format they often get shuffled to the bottom of the EE's ever-growing pile of work.
Because of SSA's archaic approach to systems no one in any field office has immediate, real-time access to the main frame system.
my favorite example of SSA's outdated technology:
PCOM (which is a system that lets us access earnings records and benefits history, among others) includes a welcome screen that says "Welcome to the Future"
Here's the funny part, this is a program that is DOS based. In other words, you cannot use a mouse to navigate (you must select options by entering letter codes). I imagine that this program has been around since at least 1990.
Yet SSA continues to include the absurd "Welcome to the Future" and steadfastly refuses to upgrade the interface to something that at least approaches current technology.
PCOM started in 1986! And has not changed one bit since then.
I second the comments about PCOM. I sent numerous memos up the line for years advocating a transfer to a system that wasn't DOS-related (a la Windows) in the 90s. I've been retired two years and can't believe PCOM is still around. SSA uses a lot of Windows programs, but they don't have real time mainframe access to ERs or MBRs, as in the ability to instantly make a change and to be able to verify the change. It's all MI crap like waiting times, Internet stuff like stats and the like.
While it sounds good, his plan speaks in vague flowering generalities favored by all high level IT folks. And, in the end, it suffers from the same ultimately fatal flaw that all plans to modernize SSA systems share:
It is based upon a logical fallacy, that being a presumption that it is possible to model SSA's claims and post-entitlement workloads into a coherent, logical workflow that can be completely automated.
Unfortunately, the law isn't logical, and here is where those "75 years of legal baggage" cause unmitigated chaos. Combined family maximums, RIB lims, Parisi adjustments, dual entitlements, triple entitlements, simultaneous entitlements, retroactivity, 202(j)(1)/203(j)(3) cases, delayed claimants, SSI/SSP credit months, ARFs/DRCs, etc. And don't forget all the incorrect and incompletely coded records that exist, along with the fact that different rules apply to different time periods due to acquiescence rulings and legal precedents.
It is miserable enough at the single record level, but you get into a whole new world of reekin' badness when multiple record interactions become involved.
This is one of the things that is dragging SSA down now: 20 years ago, multiple record entitlements were occasional things - you'd run in to them a few times a week, mainly involving wives or widows and RIB/DIB. Now, it is an unusual day for me when 15-20% of the records I see involve multiple entitlements. And most things with SSA systems don't work right on multiple entitlements due to their often illogical policy/legal underpinnings - a large majority of the inputs end up as exceptions in OCO/PSC backlogs, where the employees (mainly in OCO at this point) mostly don't give a damn whether they fix anything right or not - I can't remember the last time I referred ANYTHING to OCO where I didn't have to fight for 6 months to get it fixed because the employees there aren't held responsible and can't be bothered to check their shoddy work (probably because they know it is shoddy and, as previously stated, they just don't give a damn one way or the other as long as they do just enough to make the case SEP - Somebody Else's Problem).
The only way it will ever be possible to fully automate SSA systems is to throw everything out and start over, something that will obviously never happen.
I've used turbo tax since it was owned by chipsoft and came on floppy discs but likely because I'm a plain old wage earner, it could handle my taxes easily enough. But today, with modest investment income, and wages and the AMT, I cannot trust it any more and have to use a tax preparer.
Likewise, I suspect not because of the complexity of most people's earnings or retirement plans but because of the excellent recitation by Anon#5 above about the complexity of the law, policy, rules and regs (which court acquiescence applies to an internet filing?) that the dream of turbo tax-lie retirement or an iphone rib app is a pipe dream.
And an insidious one that diverts scarce resources chasing a pipe dream.
And make it 508 compliant, offer alternatives to notices via cd or tape for certain people and a myriad of things that turbo tax doesn't have to do... well, it's clear that it's not as simple as it sounds.
As far as I understand it, Ephraim's group did develop (or were in the process of developing) prototypes to show that this stuff actually works (the 'Turbo-tax' part at least). The law isn't logical or simple, but that definitely doesn't mean it can't be automated properly - which it most definitely is not right now.
All I can tell you is having worked in Systems for a while, people in upper management really have absolutely no idea what they're talking about when it comes to modern technology. Even worse, a lot of the programmers who have been there for 20+ years and only know COBOL and maybe a little bit of Java have a vested interest in undermining anything that might make them irrelevant.
I don't claim to understand much about it technology. But I have a doctorate in law, have known ephraim feig since he was a teenager and like most of us, have experienced the utter incompetence of big government and the entrenched bureaucracy.
Ephraim is one of the most intelligent and innovative thinkers I know. If he said that the ssa is bloated and inefficient, I would take him at his word over the conflicting pronouncements of the entrenched lifers in big government. Good all ephraim probably intimidated these clowns with his innovative approach and can do attitude. Better to show him the door than to upset their useless outdated systems.
Nobody will likely see this besides the blog owner, but this is worth looking back 12 years later. I am gobsmacked by some of the stuff received alleged in Ephraim's plan. This one really stuck out to me:
"SSA’s Policy executives have told me that there are some policy changes they would recommend to implement in order to significantly simplify overly complex processes, but they are constrained from doing so because SSA’s Systems folks tell them that to do so would require such enormous technology resources and time that the costs would be prohibitive."
So let me get this straight. SSA decides against policy changes meant to simplify overly complex processes based solely on the idea of the minuscule amount of Systems employees saying "That will cost us having to do more work!" Rephrasing this another way, the needs of ALL operations employees, and ALL beneficiaries, comes second to 50 Systems employees who's JOB IT IS, to make systems efficient. Holy shit, how was there not a bigger stink about this at the time? Hindsight is 20/20 but imagine the possibility of the agency having gone this route and how things *may* be different today? But they didn't, they are STILL using PCOM, rolled out in 1987.....in 2023. The same program for 36 years. Astounding how out of touch and useless SSA management has been for decades. Please make a new blog post about this and let's talk about this in retrospect. I think a lot of people would love to look back on this now that employees have some hindsight a decade later.
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