Social Security Information Systems Near Collapse

matty619 writes "An Information Week article warns that the computer systems that run the Social Security Administration may collapse by 2012 due to increased workload, and a half-billion-dollar upgrade won't be ready until 2015. One of the biggest problems is the agency's transition to a new data center, according to a report (PDF) by the SSA's Inspector General. The IG has characterized the replacement of the SSA's National Computer Center — built in 1979 — as the SSA's 'primary IT investment' in the next few years."

pathetic

[z-j-y]

this is a very light system. (no, it doesn't have millions of users.)

Re:2012

[FrootLoops]

Ads depress me for a similar reason. Announcer voices are male or female depending on what's being sold; homemaker-type products use white upper middle class-style actresses; life insurance commercials use old male announcers, unless it's the Gerber Life commercial (ironically showing right now) in which case it uses a young (but not too young) woman. Of course, these are generalizations and not strict rules, but the correlation is strong. Incidentally, I hate marketing. It seems to be a necessary evil, but I wish their manipulations were as transparent to everyone as they are to me. Maybe then ads would contain more actual content and less flash.

(Yes, this is off topic, but discussing the social security system's IT infrastructure isn't exactly thrilling conversation.)

A good place for Gov. to be run like a business

[maraist]

This is sick. The three physical costs of S.S. as I can see it:
1) Data acquisition (who has incrementally paid into the system) - this is B.S. accounting because it's all going to come from the general tax fund soon anyway, so why the charade?
2) Call centers - (this is for old people after all)
3) Printing checks

The rest can be handled by less than a million dollars in hardware / software.
3 can be outsourced (paychex doesn't overburdern my company with overhead as far as I know).
2 can be outsourced and them some
1 as I already alluded to is the fault of congress, and is largely unnecessary. You have to double the efforts of the IRS to make sure payments are correct. You have to audit, you have to make multiple transfers of small orders of money. You need financial advisors (who purchase US treasuriers with the surpluses), bla bla bla.. All simplified by simply being part of the general tax fund and withdrawing directly from US treasury.

A hadoop system can trivially destroy 300 million pieces of data in less than an hour - I don't care what language it's written in. This incremental B.S. thinking is pervasive in all forms of government and just needs to be viserally reacted to by the voting public. A company that's not in the black that needs a $500M investment to 'keep afloat' for crap like this would go out of business and be replaced from scratch. Dead is a powerful natural tool. It needs to be applied here.

Re:*HOW* Much?!

[vlm]

$500M is about $1.40 per US citizen.

From experience doing genealogical research, if SS is anything like the civil war era northern army pension system, this would still be a substantial cost savings over doing it manually, crazy as that might sound.

Also from having been involved in major data conversion projects over the decades, a cost of $2 per account converted would have been an incredible daydream. Just having a final step of a semi-intelligent semi-trained human being review the converted account will cost more. The only thing saving the SS is probably huge scale and frankly all the accounts are pretty much the same story other than personally identifiable information.

Finally from having been around for awhile I know that shock stories like this are based on rolling everything they possibly can into that figure, rounding up, passing along to the next guy whom adds some more (maybe even the same stuff) and rounds up again, repeat until a scary enough figure is generated. So this is probably like three annual department budgets plus training budget plus a lifetime supply of backup tapes plus a couple weeks salary for all front end personnel (assuming they're paid during training).

Re:Collapse?

[Belial6]

A decade ago, I did work on updating the system at the 'California Board of Pest Control'. They had a system that had "collapsed". What it looked like was an office that had stopped buying cubicle walls. They instead had built their walls from stacks of paper that had to be processed. They literally had walls made of stacked paper. I will say it a third time just because the image in my head was so startling. They had made the internal walls of the office out of 12' tall stacks of paper. When I displayed shock at what I saw, they explained that this was just the new stuff that they hadn't gotten moved to the big warehouse across the street. It looked a lot like one of those houses you see on the news where the owner went insane, and become a hard core pack rat.