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GCN Home > 04/19/04 issue

William Gray - SSA: A two-way street

By Mary Mosquera, GCN Staff

Gray’s approach to staff development proves mutually beneficial

One measure of William Gray’s success at the Social Security Administration can be found in big-picture results, such as system uptime, a proliferation of online services and “green” ratings from the Office of Management and Budget.

Another measure can be found in the number of people lined up, at least figuratively, outside his door.

As deputy commissioner for systems, Gray oversees all of SSA’s IT, accounting for one-fourth of the agency’s operating budget.

Under his leadership, the Office of Systems has maintained stable systems performance and achieved the government’s highest rating for secure and reliable computer systems, SSA commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart said. In fiscal 2003, SSA transaction systems had 99.78 percent availability. SSA also attained a “green” rating from OMB for its progress in all five areas of the President’s Management Agenda.

A reason for that success is the work environment that Gray has helped create. He “instills a spirit of cooperation and teamwork ... providing an environment in which people work to their highest potential,” Barnhart said.

He continually increases training opportunities for technical staff and rotates assignments so employees can effectively support all major system users, she said.

Gray also takes a personal interest in mentoring employees on developmental assignments and participates in the Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program.

“Requests from program participants across the agency for assignments have been so numerous that it has been difficult to juggle schedules to accommodate all those who want to do an assignment in his office,” Barnhart said.

For Gray, mentoring and development programs are win-win propositions.

“I value having that interaction, of having people outside the [systems] organization come in and work with us,” he said. “You want to try to tap into that energy and creativity to find out what you can do differently that would make this a stronger organization.”

Gray tries to give temporary assignees the chance to show what they can do for the organization. One, for example, was a personnel expert who evaluated overtime patterns. He determined the average amounts of overtime people were using and, more important, compared the use of sick leave with people who worked a lot of overtime.

“By stressing people and having them work so many long hours, were we then turning around and having these people get sick and be off of work?” Gray said. “It allowed us to make better decisions about how to balance our workload.”

He also rewards the contributions of those he leads. During the past year, Gray recognized 12 teams, comprising nearly 350 employees, for their initiative and dedication to improving the business processes in the Office of Systems, Barnhart said.

Gray started with SSA 28 years ago, and has steadily risen through the ranks, acquiring his management skills along the way. He’s adept at building coalitions within SSA and with other federal and state agencies, Barnhart said.

His work was pivotal in 2001 in achieving SSA’s goal of making 21 percent of customer services available via the Internet or automated phone service. That includes allowing constituents to apply for benefits, request a Social Security statement and check benefits status. SSA also lets employers register for personal identification numbers and passwords for uploading wage reports.

Gray also shortened the software development life-cycle for Internet applications from 12 months to three months. He reorganized the Office of Systems around program areas and according to key enterprisewide functions.

His biggest project now is overhauling the infrastructure to support automated disability processing, Barnhart said. It’s expected to save more than $1.3 billion over the next seven years.

And, she said, he’s accepted the challenge of an aggressively compressed timeframe—Gray cut the implementation schedule from seven years to 22 months.
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