Huge sums of money were spent in recent years building two computer centers for the Social Security Administration, a National Computer Center in the Baltimore area and a backup computing center near me in North Carolina. It now looks like this money was wasted. The agency just issued a request for information on moving its data operations to the cloud. At the rate things are going, the National Computer Center may never even be used. Great planning.
6 comments:
Why don't you investigate the millions spent on Ebb. This project is doomed for failure and guaranteed to increase the backlog, but the powers that be refuse to acknowledge that it is not workable for the hearing process. HPI level failure and then some...
Charles, you are, like the thing on the Altmeyer, looking at things through a very biased lens - i.e., money spent on anything other than the services you think it should be spent on must be misspent. First of all, it is a federal priority that agencies go to the cloud as much as is feasible. SSA has its own cloud, but that's not enough. The data center isn't being replaced by what they are looking at. It's capabilities are being expanded. Note that they are looking at both interfaces as well as migrations and what that means is moving some legacy items into new and more current software platforms or interfacing with new platforms when migration doesn't make sense. These will allow new services and avoid adding to the data center. So your assessment that the money spent was wasted isn't based on fact at all. (By the way, the new data center is already being used, and 2016 is when it switches over fully. Lots of things being done every day to operationalize it.)
This blog's coverage of the budget has been a joke.
I really enjoy your blog, Charles, AND, I believe this post was a bit negative and not constructive.
Sunk cost is sunk
The National Computer Center has been in use for decades at HQ in Woodlawn. The new data center in Urbana is the National Service Center.
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