Top 10 Government Stories Of 2010

The Social Security Administration (SSA) has chosen Lockheed Martin to lead the team in charge of overhauling its system for processing disability claims.

The agency has chosen the firm as the prime contractor to build its Disability Case Processing System (DCPS), which will help the agency process disability claims faster and with higher consistency than it currently does, according to Lockheed. The contract has a one-year base period with five one-year options; if all are exercised, the value of the contract will be $200 million.

The new system will consolidate 54 existing federal and state claims-processing systems into one, and must be scalable enough to manage about 4 million cases annually. Flexibility also is key to the system's design, as about 50,000 SSA staff members will need to access the system, according to Lockheed.

The plan for DCPS is to build a Web services-based system that's integrated with a central electronic disability process as well as electronic health record (EHR) systems. The SSA recently approved technology to allow it to share interoperable health records with organizations that store and manage them. DCPS also will be based on a service-oriented architecture and include services that will be reusable through SSA.

Subcontractors that will work with Lockheed on the project include Iron Data Solutions, based in Atlanta; Global CI, based in Baltimore; and MacQuarium Intelligent Communications, also based in Atlanta.

Improving its historically slow disability-claims processing is just one of a host of IT modernization projects SSA is working on, but the agency is not without challenges to complete them.

The SSA's transition to a new data center, in particular, is facing a serious timing problem. Its projected completion date is 2015, but a report by the SSA Inspector General predicted that the agency's current data center will collapse under its workload by 2012.