I was interested to read that President Obama wants the government to enter the 21st century by adopting 21st century technologies. And he had Social Security on his mind. The President
brought dozens of top business executives — including Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, Facebook’s Chris Hughes, and PG&E’s Peter Darbee — to the White House to solicit advice on how to make the federal government more responsive and customer-friendly through technology.
Making government bureaucracies more tech-savvy is a problem that has bedeviled past administrations — remember Vice President Al Gore’s “Reinventing Government” project? — but Obama, who created new positions of chief technology officer and chief information officer to underscore his commitment to technological innovation in government, insists he’s serious.
“Washington lags a generation behind in how we do business,” Obama said. “If you can book dinner on OpenTable or a flight on Southwest online” — two companies represented at the forum — “then why shouldn’t you be able to make an appointment at your local Social Security office the same way?”
The Social Security Administration is likely doing better than most government agencies when it comes to the adoption of newer technologies. Within the disability program, all applications for disability are electronic (i.e. there are no paper files), and it’s anticipated that representatives of disability claimants will have secure internet access to their client’s files later this year.
Other agencies have fared less well. For example, the “U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has a three-year backlog of patent applications, largely because each of the more than 400,000 applications annually must be printed out, scanned and then entered into the agency’s antiquated case management system.”
