Social Security Administration

To better serve a growing beneficiary population and improve productivity, the Social Security Administration (SSA) is redesigning its work processes and modernizing its computer systems. The Intelligent Workstation/Local Area Network project is intended to provide the basic automation infrastructure needed to increase SSA's processing abilities. The first phase of the planned project is a seven-year, approximately $1 billion effort to acquire more than 56,000 intelligent workstations and 1,700 local area networks. This report (1) discusses the status of SSA's implementation of the Intelligent Workstation/Local Area Network, (2) assesses whether SSA and state disability determination services operations have been disrupted by the installation of network equipment, and (3) assesses SSA's practices for managing its investment in the network.

GAO noted that: (1) SSA has moved aggressively in installing intelligent workstations and LANs since initiating IWS/LAN acquisitions in December 1996; (2) as of mid-March 1998, it had completed the installation of about 31,000 workstations and 850 LANs, generally meeting its implementation schedule for phase I of the initiative; (3) the contractor that is installing IWS/LAN has expressed concerns about the future availability of the intelligent workstations that SSA is acquiring; (4) problems encountered in developing software intended to operate on IWS/LAN could affect SSA's planned schedule for proceeding with phase II of this initiative; (5) staff in SSA offices generally reported no significant disruptions in their ability to serve the public during the installation and operation of their IWS/LAN equipment; (6) some state DDSs reported that SSA's decision to manage and control DDS networks remotely and the IWS/LAN contractor's inadequate responses to DDS' service calls have led to disruptions in some of their operations; (7) because IWS/LAN is expected to correct year 2000 deficiencies in some states' hardware, delaying the installation of IWS/LAN could affect states' progress in becoming year 2000 compliant; (8) consistent with the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 and Office of Management and Budget guidance, SSA has followed some of the essential practices required to effectively manage its IWS/LAN investment; (9) SSA has not established essential practices for measuring IWS/LAN's contribution to improving the agency's mission performance; (10) although the agency has developed baseline data and performance measures that could be used to assess the project's impact on mission performance, it has not defined target performance goals or instituted a process for using the measures to assess the impact of IWS/LAN on mission performance; (11) SSA does not plan to conduct a post-implementation review of IWS/LAN once it is fully implemented; and (12) without targeted goals and a defined process for measuring performance both during and after the implementation of IWS/LAN, SSA cannot be assured of the extent to which this project is improving service to the public or that it is actually yielding the savings anticipated from this investment.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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