Sylviane Haldiman, Social Security's Associate Deputy Commissioner for the Office of Systems, has been announced as a Pathfinder award winner by Government Executive. The Pathfinder award goes to those who "bring the best information technology solutions available into the federal sphere."
Neither the article nor the post explain what she did/brought to the table. Interested to know what her contribution is/was.
ReplyDeleteAgree with first comment. What has she accomplished, because I am not seeing the results of any recent IT solutions. In fact, SSA's tech incompetence has been a major pain point during the pandemic (OHO excluded). Field office service has declined, partly due to a lack of IT solutions for a completely remote work-force. Whatever she has in the works, needs to accelerated 10x.
ReplyDeleteIT at SSA is outdated everywhere. Would like to know what the basis of the award was.
ReplyDeleteSylviane is now in Hearings Operations. She was an Operations person, came into Systems. Those who actually worked for her in Systems were mixed about her as a leader. Took a lot of credit for others work is what I was told, but could be sour grapes.
ReplyDeleteCurious, whats the delineation between operations and systems? What is the biggest bottleneck for comprehensive IT upgrades? And are the failures more related to lack of vision and leadership at operations, or a failure of implementation by systems people? In other words, are the operations people out of touch or blocking changes everyone agrees are needed, or is the tech problem genuinely very difficult to solve?
ReplyDeleteAs a claimant representative there seem to be obvious IT problems with obvious solutions. For example, if there is staffing shortages at field offices that makes it extremely difficult to manually process mail/fax, why do they not allow representatives to attach attorney forms and other documents to the initial application, or have some system for auto processing attorney forms via unique barcodes for every new case/attorney. Are there security/privacy rules that cause problems like this to 10x harder? Second example, could the claimant's 'my social security account' be used for uploading encrypted documents for their own SSD claim--as opposed to faxing/mailing which is carry their own security concerns. If field offices are routinely losing mail with receipt confirmations, hard documents processed at the field office cannot be that secure.
DO = operations side
ReplyDeleteSystems is Agency wide and that is part of the problem
Hearings side is operations red headed step sister
SSA cant even get the necessary IT needs for infrastructure. it is sad.
ReplyDelete"I think we should, in the year of our Lord 2021, move away from green-screen COBOL mainframe programming inputs like PCOM windows just to do simple address changes"
ReplyDelete(gets buried with awards, bonuses and applause)
LOL @1200PM...I'm truly just here for the comments; however flawed or accurate or wrong they are...
ReplyDeleteThere was an award to be given, and a recipient was found.
ReplyDelete