From Federal News Network:
The Social Security Administration used the project to modernize its Disability Case Processing System as a proof of concept.
The question then became could SSA replicate the success of DCPS with other legacy, traditional waterfall programs.
Sean Brune, the CIO of SSA, said the answer is a resounding “yes.” The agency is taking the success of the DCPS2 and expanding it through its new IT modernization strategy as a way to guide SSA’s transformation. ...
SSA revamped DCPS2 starting in 2015, and over a 14-month period using DevSecOps to move from a COBOL based, green-screen system that had been in use for more than 25 years. SSA and states use DCPS to determine if claimants are qualified from a medical perspective for a benefit. State and territories process the claims on behalf of SSA using DCPS as a case management and disability determination system.
Brune said the DCPS2 success helped SSA expand their focus on overall IT modernization by further identifying core mission functions, building expertise in modern application development around those core mission functions. ...
“We trained more agile Scrum Masters. ...
Is DCPS such a big success that it's time to take a victory lap? I don't know because I don't use it. I know that DCPS has been controversial, at least in the past.
7 comments:
It is hard to even know where to begin when discussing the DCPS boondoggle. This system has been under development for almost 15 years now. Hundreds of thousands off hours - if not millions of hours - of labor have been spent on it. It has been "restarted" at least three times. When the labor costs are included, billions of dollars have been spent on DPCS.
The purpose of DCPS was to replace a highly functional vendor-built system that was managed by the States. The goal was to assume greater control over the state DDSs. When the initiative was first announced at a national meeting, Commissioner Astrue commented that the Office of Systems "had been lusting for years" to take over the state-run systems. Although
lip service has been paid to supposed customer-service benefits of a new system, Astrue's statement is the most accurate statement I can recall about the true genesis of DCPS.
One of the most outrageous claims being made for DCPS is that it will improve decisional accuracy and consistency. But anyone who works with these systems knows that they have nothing to do with decision-making per se. They maintain documentation of the case development and medical and vocational assessments and manage work flow.
The Federal News Week article says that SSA has already seen benefits, such as "Improving accuracy and timeliness of decisions".
In fact, per SSA's own measures, the DDS quality is at an all-time low right now and case processing times are at an all-time high. The pandemic certainly has something to do with this, but any suggestion that DCPS is improving DDS productivity or accuracy is not true, and is unlikely to ever be true.
This is not to say that SSA is not doing a good job developing the DCPS application. After years of fits and starts, they finally do seem to be on track. But any honest cost-benefit assessment would clearly show that this was an extremely wasteful project with few or no potential customer benefits.
I think productivity and accuracy have more to do with DDS hiring levels than any programs. Staffing gets critically low with cases backing up and getting sent to FDDS then hires come onboard in mass and it takes several years to get them up to speed. Oregon went thru this few years back.
Just wasteful spending. When I got in the SSA game around 2005, I actually thought the SSA was cutting edge in technology with its ERE system.
I had done workers comp in California and VA cases. They were (and sometimes still are) doing paper medical record submissions. The ERE changed this. So that was a big plus. But anything else has gone horribly wrong in terms of spending on technology.
Nothing really has improved. The VTC system was fairly advanced for the time but no big whoop now with things like Zoom. Just a waste.
The old state systems were dinosaurs and had become a roadblock and essentially a captive money stream for the developers. A whole lot of needed change could not be done timely because the mix and match setup of the DDS systems meant things could only go with the most common denominator. Things had to work across 3+ state systems. Systems whose hardware and software and operating costs SSA paid for.
Not saying implementing DCPS was anything to be proud of, prior to 2015 it just seemed like the project that would never get there. But the rationale for it did and does make sense.
DCPS2 started in 2015 and is replacing the aging legacy systems. DCPS2 is very solid from a systems architectural perspective and runs in the cloud using some of the latest technologies. It supports the vast majority of claims for the DDS and they are finishing up adding a few needed features.
DCPS has recently been used as the foundation for several other projects at SSA and has saved them a tremendous amount of time, money, and effort.
All those billions spent, and I still have to fill out paper forms for an EXR and send them off into a black hole with no tracking.
Post a Comment