Nov 17, 2021

A Mobile Accessible Platform To Handle All Of Social Security's Transactions?

      From Federal News Network:

The Biden administration is working on an executive order focused on improving customer experience within government and building on its ongoing work to improve the equity of public-facing services. ...

The draft executive order directs agencies to link customer experience metrics to their strategic plans and priority goals. It also ties that progress into performance review requirements for members of the Senior Executive Service and senior management. ...

Individual agency actions under consideration include the State Department providing a new online passport renewal experience, the Social Security Administration creating a mobile-accessible online platform that can handle all transactions and the Transportation Security Administration implementing new tools at airport security checkpoints to reduce passenger wait times. ...

    People who think that a single mobile accessible platform will handle all of Social Security's transactions with the public greatly underestimate the complexity of the work that the Social Security Administration does. That's one of Social Security's biggest problems -- the public perception that what the agency does is simple -- just processing people onto retirement benefits. Most of what the agency does is far more complicated than that. Many of the agency's forms should be simplified but they would still be far too long to be completed on a cell phone.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Be careful posting anything that says the work SSA does is complex. According to most people who post on this blog, anyone can do it with little or no training!

On a serious note, a good mobile app would be a great addition to the online system as not all web pages scale appropriately to the mobile experience. And while the more complex workloads can't be done online, anything that gets the traffic out of the FO for things like replacement SSN cards, benefit verifications, address changes or other simpler issues will only help.

Here's another suggestion a long those lines...SSA needs tech support dedicated to helping those that are having issues with anything related to online services. Having them call or try to come in to the local FO is just adding additional work on the already thin staffing.

While not everyone has a computer, I would say the majority have a smart phone. The future of online transactions has been coming for a long time. Try as you might to fight it, it will become the norm. Instead of complaining, someone should use it as an opportunity to create outreach specifically for helping those in need face this change.

Anonymous said...

How many meetings did Systems staff have on apps, on plans for things like this, strategic planning meetings, vision meetings? In my decades there we must have met to discuss this - claims taking and customer interactions on the web, on phone apps, - a whole damn lot. At least going back 20 years. What got in the way was security, platform tools, customer experience and complexity of the actions. Accessibility for teh disabled was a big deal. (PII leaks in 2008 laid low many a plan to go mobile until underlying security issues were addressed, and still may not be adequate.) Many of those issues ahve been improved or resolved but complexity remains. If trained staff messes up in claims taking and resolving how to process a transaction, the one time customer without training will not do much better.

The simpler something sounds teh harder it is to implement.

Anonymous said...

SSA really needs an IT overhaul. Mobile app does no good if all the back-end IT infrastructure and coding is garbage. And for the love of god, please allow attorneys to attach documents to the initial disability application!! This would resolve alot of the mail processing delays. Frankly I do not understand why attorney assignment could not be largely automated with smart forms.

SSA relies too much on skilled workers for basic clerical tasks that could be automated or semi-automated.