From Manual Processes for Resource-intensive Workloads, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General
Our objective was to determine whether the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) automation enhancements (1) reduced manual processing for resource-intensive workloads and (2) were cost-effective. ...
SSA’s automation enhancements reduced the need for manual processing for some workloads from FYs 2019 to 2021. These initiatives aimed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of SSA’s operations; however, they were not always immediately cost-effective. Additionally, SSA could not identify cost or savings estimates for some enhancements; thus, we could not determine whether they were cost-effective. ......
8 comments:
What were the automation enhancements? Because virtually every IT "upgrade" I have seen still requires manual processing on the back end. I have not seen any "full" automated processes in the disability claims process where they are desperately needed. I think both attorneys and FO workers would agree that far too much time is spent on manual processing of forms...and that human errors in processing these forms have increased dramatically since 2019.
SSA needs to stop being so risk adverse, and take steps to overhaul the POMS to allow for more automation and less tedious manual data entry.
Of course they cant come up with a cost savings - the new automation caused techs to take more time to process work and actually cost the agency more money!
Ssa won’t say , since the automation projects are failures and result in more onerous work for technicians
The vast majority of "automation enhancements" actually take more steps to process the same workload as before the "enhancement." Part of this is a lot of SSA applications don't talk to each other like they should. A lot of extra clicking, or reinputting information the system should already get from another application. SSA systems are a nightmare and a half. It's almost as if SSA systems engineers have no field experience and they also don't even talk to the field/test their applications before they are shipped to operations employees. So people who don't know how workloads are processed, are making applications to process workloads without any knowledge of how to make things efficient. Another fantastic move by SSA "leadership."
Where to begin... Overhaul the POMS to allow for more automation.. Folks forget that policy is the bedrock on which all processes, manual or automated, stem from. You want "full automation"? You need policy revision. The Program Operations Manual System isn't policy. But Policy isn't just magic, it is based in law and reg. So sometimes you can change things on your own, other times you can't. And all users of a system have needs. And computers aren't magic, at SSA still hamstrung by legacy systems and data, so often complex scenarios are beyond what a system can do and humans remain required. (And introduce a new from the ground system and listen to the complaints despite testing and testing.) And systems aren't developed in a vacuum, but a lot of staff have operations experience, systems in development are vetted by teams of users from all levels - but the result will always be a camel, an animal designed by committee. An animal despite agileness that will never compete with a clean sheet of paper system written from the ground up with latest tech and stable policies and workflows.
But in typical OIG fashion of stating the obvious as if only they can perceive it we get gems like this - SSA also introduced robotic applications (bots) to assist processing center employees with manual workloads. SSA could
increase its return on investment for the robotics initiative by increasing the use of existing bots and developing new bots to assist with additional workloads. (OMG, call the NY Times with this breakthrough...) Their prior audit recommendations are just as obvious, some day SSA will respond to one of these with a memo that simply says "Duh"
About ten years ago, maybe more, Reps were issued a Rep ID number. The idea was that this would then link to representative information such as address, phone number, tax ID number etc and would flow through all the systems automatically making it possible for the Agency to quickly identify all cases involving a particular representative simply by entering that ten alphanumeric just one time.
As far as I know, that has never worked. That Rep ID number is not requested on the 1696 and the only form that asks for it is the Fee Petition 1560 Form.
Does anyone know if I am missing something here or is this number still floating about in the system somehow?
And the comment above that whoever designs the forms and systems seem to know nothing about how information is needed or processed could not be more correct. I have been a guinea pig on long calls with consultants within SS asking what information is really needed is creating forms and worksheets and it is readily apparent that none of these experts, well meaning though they are, have any idea what these forms are needed for and what is required to process a claim.
I’m curious. Is everyone who keeps saying SSA needs to start its system over from a blank piece of paper seriously saying that SSA needs to completely redesign its entire system’s infrastructure from scratch and not deploy any of it until the whole thing is done?
Because if this is what you are asking you don’t live in reality and are basically telling us why you don’t work for OIS or DCS.
If you want improvement and new systems they have to come out as they are developed which is what SSA is doing. It’s not as easy as you think to take instructions from an Executive Order and have a functioning system in a short period of time that interfaces with the hundreds of data exchanges with other agencies and hundreds of data silos SSA uses.
If you know how to make that happen, by all means, share it.
@4:47PM literally everything you've said is wrong. The current 1696 uses Rep ID, so that we no longer need a 1695 to process anything (thus solving a major rep complaint, the use of their own Social Security Numbers). We literally put you in RASR using Rep IDs. I do a dozen of them a day.
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