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Social Security Information Systems Near Collapse

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-unlike-social-security dept.

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."

9 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. *HOW* Much?! by Seumas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.

    Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states. And as our unqualified, ignorant, idiotic National CIO stated last year -- something like this, anyway -- "we need to improve the computer human interface with skip-logic, because a lot of things are in COBOL binary interface". Or something.

    Oh, and note that the article said that half a billion dollars is just what has been allocated for the project. So far. How much longer are these guys going to get away with these twenty million dollar Drupal *.gov website projects and other scams?!

    1. Re:*HOW* Much?! by WarwickRyan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I know that it sounds like a lot of money, but it may not actually be that bad, depending on what, exactly, is included in that budget.

      If, say, they're including upgrading all IT infrastructure for the agency (all desktops, laptops, network etc), and they're including things such as training of users and rollout costs, then it really isn't such a crazy figure at all.

      That's also the problem with these projects. They include everything under the sun in one project budget, instead of splitting it out into multiple smaller budgets.

    2. Re:*HOW* Much?! by grimJester · · Score: 5, Funny

      Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states.

      Yes, and upgrading legacy code to become a modern data center is hard. Why, I remember how I struggled to turn a simple Pascal Hello World into a cafeteria. Can you believe there's no open source tool to translate for loops into pretzels?

      Hint: It's a building. With computers. And data.

    3. Re:*HOW* Much?! by WarwickRyan · · Score: 5, Informative

      Now I've RTA I do.. it's just talking about hardware..

    4. Re:*HOW* Much?! by DarkOx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I really find these OMG we have to get away from COBOL articles sort of silly. While I agree that doing new development in COBOL probably does not make a whole lot of sense most of the time using the existing code base is not a problem. IBM makes it real easy to not only run your forty year old COBOL applications but integrate them with Java, Ruby and other more modern languages. You can even do things like implement web services and the like pretty easily in COBOL these days, I have seen some pretty impressive copy books.

      What we should remember is COBOL has run these business systems for 40 years with success. It might not be the most fun thing to write code in but its actually quite good for accounting and basic reporting processes. Oh sure you can do these things in C, C++, Java, or anything else just fine but in general its going to be more error prone because those languages are not really targeted at the task and in truth probably use more total lines of code to get it done, even if most of its warped up in some frame work or STL. Finally most of these business accounting type tasks really do make more sense thought about in structured programming terms or even just simply as control break processes, they can be forced on to an object model like anything else but the operative word there is forced.

      There are lots of good reasons to replace systems and forklift old code. If you are tossing out you old COBOL process because its a mess of badly done spaghetti code fine, if you are getting rid of it just because OMGs COBOL is dying that is fixing what is not broken an asking for trouble.

      --
      Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
  2. Flash... by Genda · · Score: 5, Funny

    In a related story, it has been reported that top officials at the Social Security Administration are prepared to reduced the entire Social Security System to a Web App and run it on the Amazon Cloud.

  3. Re:2012 by mangu · · Score: 5, Funny

    If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.

    And I'd invade China and only China. Your planet would owe its ass to my planet.

  4. OMG! $500,000,000.00 for a datacenter by theVarangian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.

    I like bashing expensive government projects as much as the next guy, but if you are creating a nation wide IT system of any kind for a nation of 300+ million people $500,000,000.00 it doesn't sound too far off. Hell, Apple just sank $1 billion into a datacenter and Google sank $600 million into a datacenter in Berkeley, South Carolina and that one is just one of their many data centers. People love to take the total costs for a project like this and shout: "SCANDAL! $500,000,000.00 spent on failed IT project". Nobody mentions that the investment in a data center is largely recoverable since it and it's hardware can easily be repurposed. It's only development and training costs that are wasted which is bad enough but still only a fraction of the costs. The main scandal here is not so much the cost of, its the fact that they will run out of capacity before the new datacenter is ready. As for COBOL being a dying language COBOL is in good company on death row along with C, C++, OpenGL, BSD (and UNIX in general) plus a number of other things IT that have been labeled as "dying" almost as long as I have been in the IT business which is longer than I care to remember. The claim " is dying!" is a long time IT gutter-press favorite.

  5. Re:2012 by slick7 · · Score: 5, Funny

    If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.

    If I was an alien, I'd invade France, always do the easy problems first.

    --
    The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.