Beyond a Lifetime of Data

For most businesses, customer data has a shelf life in days, months, years. What about when the data needs to be collected today, so that you can use it decades or over a century later? The customer relationship with Social Security starts from when a Social Security Number is issued and lasts even after death to support qualified survivors. SSAs current critical data structures go back to the late 1970s, when records were king and contain only a snapshot of information at collection. In that time, the legislation around the critical data has evolved, but wide-spread dependencies restricted structure evolution. By shifting our processes to an Event Driven Architecture, one business line at a time, we hope to set the stage to revisit our critical data query models, while highlighting and correcting the data quality issues that inevitably built up over decades.