From Federal News Radio:
The Social Security Administration is approximately six months into what will likely be a five-year effort to modernize the agency’s aging IT infrastructure. Sean Brune, chief program officer for IT modernization at SSA, said many of the planned upgrades revolve around services used by the general public. This fiscal year, Brune said, the agency will focus on improving communications and existing services.
“We’re currently working to put all of our online services behind that secure online portal … my Social Security,” he said on Federal Insights: IT Modernization. “We encourage all members of the public to establish their personal my Social Security account. That will then allow, prospectively, a member of the public to see all the relevant services for their circumstance.”
These could include filing claims, checking claims status, services for representative payees.
Enhancing its public offerings will involve more mobile digital services. Brune said the agency has been building responsive design into all new services to detect when portal users are on mobile devices.
IT modernization also includes updating the disability claims processing application — to help SSA cut down on the backlog — and enhancing cybersecurity. With two secure data processing centers, Brune said the agency is covered in that regard. ...Of course, this is not unimportant work. The problem is that it's being done at the expense of service to the public today. Lines are present outside field offices and phone calls aren't being answered while staffing dwindles.
7 comments:
I hope SSA continue to expand the online account services. If a claimant/beneficiary could conduct 75% of their social security matters online then it's government money well spent. I have noticed for awhile in the terms of conditions it mention click to chat. That would be a helpful feature for the public.
Well, I'd say that they need to add upgrades to hearing office computer equipment and systems. When it takes 5 minutes just to open or close a single program - 5 minutes! - and trying to multitask with several programs at once causes serial crashes, there's a serious problem with functionality. I swear I'm not making this up. The wholesale move to "a laptop on every desk" was a HUGE step backwards in terms of overall speed and functionality, at least in my hearing office.
8:39, my laptop is now 3 years old, and the boot times/crashing have grown exponentially in the last year. I did not have issues earlier on. but I believe we have exceeded the useful life of the equipment. I have been fortunate; others in our office have had total hard drive failure, in some cases multiple times over. I would also add that 1 HOSA for about 70 users is an unacceptable ratio. We have a great HOSA who is now burned out and is now seeking jobs elsewhere. Our office is SOL when the HOSA goes. The equipment is only as good as the support...
Give us underpowered notebooks (you know, for work at home) then make work at home unavailable through extortion, leaving us with expensive, slow computers in 2018. Kafka would be proud.
IT modernization. Then continue to promote the HOSA position from within. What could possibly go wrong?
The agency's IT folks are idiots - SSA apparently only gets to hire the dregs that are unemployable by any other IT firm. They designed a system image that is running a 32 bit Windows OS on a laptop with 8GB of memory. As a result, the laptop can only use half of the installed memory which makes it drag like a dog with that slow hard drive installed. And, they are basing everything on Internet Explorer 11. It has gotten so bad I have to start task manager and kill all the IE processes manually to be able to log off in less than 10 minutes.
Then, you have all the worthless web applications they are moving to. Click a screen, wait for it to update. Click a hundred radio buttons on a MSSICS income screen. They've pretty much removed every shred of productivity that was left in the system by trying to legislate quality through software design. I predict, based upon the rate they are "improving" things, within 18 months SSA will have to hire twice as many employees as it has now to accomplish around 75% of the work we used to do.
God, August 3rd (early retirement) can't get here soon enough.
And good luck getting office management to replace broken equipment. I had to file a request for an alternate duty site when my office management team wouldn't replace my broken monitor.
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