Articles from prior issues of The Advocate

March/April 2001

Sue Davis Updates NADE On 2010 Team
by Ken Forbes, Oregon DDS

SUE DAVIS REPORTS THAT THE 2010 vision was put together from the bottom up and includes input from a lot of people. The charge was to look at the disability process from beginning to end without regard to the components and to focus on the customer.

Why do it? Why go through this process and develop a vision of the agency process in 2010? There is a compelling need represented by aging baby boomers, customer needs, and loss of institutional memory and knowledge. To be more specific, baby boomers represent a significant percentage of our population and they are all within a well defined age group. That group is reaching the age where they are expected to start having disabling conditions show up more frequently and they will also be retiring in short order. Both these events will put a lot of pressure on the retirement and disability systems because the number of claimants will go up dramatically. A lot of those people who retire will be employees of SSA and the DDSs. When they leave, after a life-time of accumulating knowledge about the program, they will take a huge amount of institutional memory with them. Finally, the society we live in has gotten used to a specific kind of service (better, faster, cheaper) and SSA needs to find ways to provide that service.

Service principles defined in the 2010 vision: Customer choice; Service at first point of contact; Privacy; One stop service; Proactive service; Stewardship

What will it take to make the vision a reality? It will require technology enhancements including expert systems; portable, wireless devices; video conferencing , etc.

Video Conferencing could be between the Claims Representative and examiner; the Administrative Law Judge and a vocational expert; the area directors and office managers; claimant conferences, and in interactive video training, between a single trainer and a multitude of trainees.

Speaking of which, training is a critical piece of this process. On the road to 2010 there will be many changes, technological and otherwise and, if we intend to be good service providers, we will need to be trained to function in the new systems and to use the new tools available to us. Advanced hiring will be critical to deal with the loss of staff from the aging of the baby boomers and with the implementation of the Full Process Model. By 2010, we will have created a number of new positions, such as the new one for field offices which will be adding quality assurance capabilities to the mix.

Sue says that integration will have to include operational flexibility. In simple terms, this could mean that public contact will be allowed by any means the public chooses. This could include multi media customer call centers. She sees integration resulting in fundamental change to the operations by requiring claimants to be directed to any available person and that person be able to deal with them. SSA also wants to make the record available to the claimant. Taking advantage of current technology would give us the ability to deal with questions directly on the internet.

What else is required to achieve the vision? Other important enablers will be access to electronic records to speed the processing of disability claims, and exernal alliances with advocates who can assist the claimants in participating in the claim process. Public Relations staffs will need to keep the public informed about the program and changes in it. Internal working relationships within the components will need to provide internal feedback to continuously improve the system. SSA must provide leadership for the program and all components that deal with the disability program.

Establishing a sense of urgency is a critical first step. SSA must have advisory teams that are inclusive of the stakeholders, but we have to move quickly - building powerful guiding coalitions, creating a clear vision, over communicating, removing obstacles, developing short term wins anchoring changes in the business culture. These are all aspects of the vision and necessary for SSA to accomplish in order to make the vision a reality.

Sue also talked about the “eight keys to excellence”. Fortunately I caught seven of them. Unfortunately, the eighth was probably the most important. The keys are: strategy (having a plan to achieve excellence); structure (building the pieces needed to achieve excellence); systems (developing computer and other systems to provide the tools to achieve excellence); skills (developing staff so they can perform at an excellent level); staff (having well trained, customer focused employees searching for excellence); style (what is the achievement if not done with flair?); shared values (between the employees and all the stakeholders is a critical ingredient to achieving excellence); and speed (the second best solution delivered first is better than the best solution delivered after the buying frenzy).

The 2010 vision is about serving the customer.