Social Security Administration: Enterprise Windows Deployment

The Project

The Social Security Administration needed to modernize its computing infrastructure across offices nationwide. The scale was substantial: 70,000 Microsoft Windows workstations and 4,000 Microsoft Windows servers, deployed across SSA locations throughout the United States. A project of that magnitude required automation. Manual installation at that scale was simply not viable.

My Role

I worked as an independent software engineer on this project, contracted through Brannon & Tully and embedded in Unisys’ facility in Reston, Virginia for approximately one year from 1996 into 1997. I was an individual contributor, focused entirely on the technical work.

The Work

Using Microsoft Access, I assisted in the development of an automated installation system designed to handle the deployment of Windows workstations and servers across SSA’s national office network. The system needed to manage the complexity of deploying consistent, standardized configurations at scale, across a geographically distributed environment, while minimizing the manual effort required at each location.

The Context

Coming directly off the high-pressure IFES election deployment in Sarajevo, this project represented a different kind of challenge: large-scale domestic infrastructure, a major government agency as the end client, and the discipline of working as part of a larger engineering team on a defined scope of work.

The experience of operating effectively in both leadership and individual contributor roles, across projects of widely varying scope and context, is something that has defined my approach to software development throughout my career.