From a press release:
In other Congressional hearing news, the Senate Finance Committee has rescheduled the hearing on the nomination of Gail Ennis to become Inspector General at Social Security for 10:00 the same morning.
House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee Chairman Sam Johnson (R-TX) announced today that the Subcommittee will hold a hearing titled, “The State of Social Security’s Information Technology,” on Thursday, September 27 at 11:00 AM ...
To deliver services to frontline employees and to the public, the SSA relies on a massive IT infrastructure. The SSA’s systems are housed and supported by two modern data centers and more than 7,000 physical and virtual servers.
However, many of the SSA’s core IT systems and databases are more than 30 years old. Many of these also rely on tens of millions of lines of antiquated programming languages, such as COBOL, FORTRAN, and PowerBuilder. To overhaul its systems, in October 2017, the SSA began a multi-year $691 million IT modernization effort. As part of the FY 2018 Omnibus appropriations bill (P.L. 115-141), Congress appropriated $280 million in dedicated funding.
At the same time, the SSA is in the third year of a second attempt to develop the Disability Case Processing System (DCPS) to replace the legacy case processing systems used at the state-run, federally funded Disability Determination Services. Since the reboot in 2015, DCPS has faced development delays and recently increased its cost estimate for completion of the project by more than 25 percent due to a failure to adequately identify the scope at the outset.
This will be Chairman Johnson’s final hearing as Subcommittee Chairman.Ignore the language about "antiquated programming languages." Those programs actually work. The real issue here is DCPS which isn't working. Unless the agency can find a way to turn DCPS around, it's heading rapidly towards debacle status.
In other Congressional hearing news, the Senate Finance Committee has rescheduled the hearing on the nomination of Gail Ennis to become Inspector General at Social Security for 10:00 the same morning.
5 comments:
" Ignore the language about "antiquated programming languages." Those programs actually work. "
You have absolutely no clue as to what you are speaking about.
Most of SSA's mainframe software is written in Cobol. Do you know how hard it is to find qualified mainframe Cobol programmers in this day and age at SSA's pay scales? This antiquated sofware is the major drag on systems improvements -- SSA has difficulty modifying all of that old software because the people who wrote it are all retired (and mostly dead). Thus, nobody knows how a lot of it works anymore. Do you know how SSA fixes or upgrades its systems? It runs test cases to compare the output to what they expected it to be, then make adjustments. Literally, SSA has no documentation on the development of all of these old systems.
It is a wonder it hasn't all just collapsed yet.
DCPS is an entirely different animal. It will fail not because it can't be done, but rather because SSA has developed this idiotic mindset that they can legislate quality through software design.
In short, they think they can make bad employees into good ones by legislating in minute detail everything they have to do through software design. It has never worked for anybody else who has tried it, so guess where all of this is going to go....
Also, I'm sure it's really fun to deal with 50+ little entities that do things their own way (each DDS). Man, wouldn't it be nice if this Federal program, paid for with Federal money, managed by a Federal administrative agency, following Federal rules, was run by Federal employees in a centralized manner? Crazy thinking, I know.
Yay, federalism!
Charles, I'm really not sure why you think DCPS isn't working. I'm guessing you have never seen it. It is working and working quite well. The users that I know who use it much prefer the graphical user interface over the old COBOL based system. Some states are now doing virtually all of their new cases in the system. New functionality continues to come out at a rapid pace and now includes support for Continuing Disability Reviews. This project is actually a very good example of the kind of IT modernization that SSA needs.
While I agree that a graphical user interface is preferred to the old green screen method for managing a case load, DCPS cannot deliver the functionality required to fully replace the old solutions! Even after roughly 10 years of trying and an investment nearing a half billion dollars. As for managing caseloads, the IG recently reported that DCPS, where it has been installed, is processing roughly 4% of the caseload. Further research reveals this number is overstated and is frankly appalling giving the time, effort and cost invested by SSA. Time to give it up and let the experts get the job done right!
SSA originally contracted out all of DCPS development to contractors. Your so called “experts” (MicroPact/Iron Data) had a joint DCPS effort with Lockheed Martin which was scrapped and spent over 300 million dollars. Don’t confuse that with the current effort which is being run by SSA using the latest technologies and running in the cloud. Some people would think it is appalling to give a company a second chance after they wasted so much money. Reminds me of the expression, “When you point a finger at someone there are three fingers pointing back to you”.
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