The latest on the Social Security Administration’s IT needs

By Kevin Shaker, senior analyst

Finding backend technology opportunities in the government has been tricky in recent years as agencies continue to push their environments toward shared services and Internet-as-a-Service.

However, the Social Security Administration (SSA) is one of the few civilian agencies that’s a viable target in the upcoming fiscal year for companies that offer infrastructure and infrastructure support technologies.

In order to improve the agency’s ongoing goal of achieving updated and more effective customer service, the organization has decided to revamp and modernize its backend IT infrastructure, along with a few other systems, enabling more effective customer engagement and communication.

At the end of FY18, the agency plans to finish rolling out its Customer Engagement Tools Record System, which essentially will record electronic exchanges between SSA employees and customers through “my social security” accounts. This system will be completely developed in-house and will need business and operations tools, such as compliance technology as well as bandwidth tools to enable thorough and quick access to user data.

SSA is also continuing to roll out its Disability Case Processing System, which is asking for $23 million in development modernization and enhancement (DME) dollars in FY18 to integrate applications enabling cohesive financial and workload management.

To deal with the influx of customers and updated services, the administration is also asking for over $200 million in DME dollars for its Infrastructure Modernization program in addition to the $850 million it uses for operating and maintaining its data center stature. The DME initiative will be used to replace outdated magnetic tape storage with private cloud storage solutions, along with virtualization and network administration enhancements.

SSA will be a good target for infrastructure technologies, but sales teams will want to start sooner rather than later while initiatives are still fresh.

Want to learn more about IT trends among civilian agencies? Sign up for immixGroup’s 4^th Annual Government IT Sales Summit, taking place November 16 in Reston, VA.