SSA slowed down by old mainframe

The Social Security Administration is struggling to provide benefits to a growing number of retiring baby boomers. At the same time it does not have a modern, online system to deploy.

The obstacle is an old mainframe system. SSA has stored citizens' retirement information in formats that cannot be read by modern databases or processed by computers other than the older IBM mainframes, according to a paper written by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA).

The association submitted recommendations to an SSA technology panel tasked with designing a road map for delivering electronic services throughout the next decade. CCIA is recommending that the SSA should back open standards--specifications that are not controlled by a single vendor to give the government better options for paying social security benefits.

"If you've been relying on a mainframe, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to effectively migrate off," Dan O'Connor, CCIA director of competition and telecommunications policy, told nextgov.com.

There are other problems, too, according to CCIA. The COBOL software code used by the database is obsolete and hasn't been used as an industry standard in years. In addition, some critical business applications are written in IBM assembler language, which is considered archaic by most IT professionals, and is not an industry standard, CCIA officials and federal advisers said.

"This is akin to storing major documents in hieroglyphics," O'Connor said. "There are only a few people who know this coding. They are dying off and retiring, so the supply of people who know how to use this stuff is vanishing."

For more on SSA's aging computer problems:
- see this nextgov.com article [1]