The Social Security Administration used the project to modernize its Disability Case Processing System as a proof of concept.
The question then became could SSA replicate the success of DCPS with other legacy, traditional waterfall programs.
Sean Brune, the CIO of SSA, said the answer is a resounding “yes.” The agency is taking the success of the DCPS2 and expanding it through its new IT modernization strategy as a way to guide SSA’s transformation.
“We baked into that plan a lot of the lessons learned on DCPS2. Some of those are the joint sponsorship by business users and IT developers to have them working together in parallel each step of the way, in the planning, in the coding, in the testing, in the deployment and in the operation of the software,” Brune said on Ask the CIO. “The lifecycle for that software doesn’t end when it gets to the production environment. As soon as it gets the production environment, users interact with it. We learned things and we got to put that learning back into the lifecycle, and correct known errors as promptly as possible.”
SSA revamped DCPS2 starting in 2015, and over a 14-month period using DevSecOps to move from a COBOL based, green-screen system that had been in use for more than 25 years. SSA and states use DCPS to determine if claimants are qualified from a medical perspective for a benefit. State and territories process the claims on behalf of SSA using DCPS as a case management and disability determination system.
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