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The Department of Veterans Affairs is reaching a turning point in the way it manages its technology and services.
VA draws its urgent and unwavering mindset from the pandemic and instills it in all parts of its tech infrastructure.
“Our motto was, basically, ‘let’s stay ahead of demand, whatever the demand.’ If this was the issue of telehealth visits, we want to make sure that we have, whatever the circumstances, sufficient bandwidth to meet this growing demand on the infrastructure. The cloud helped. The infrastructure upgrades have helped, ”said Paul Brubaker, deputy IT director of the VA’s account management office, during a media roundtable on September 23, which took place on Ask the CIO. “Remember that between April and June, we recruited 96,000 new employees to help us support our COVID response. They are contractors and new VA employees, and we had to provision them. I remember, I forgot the exact number of nurses, but it was well over 100 who were going to show up in Chicago this weekend. We found out on Tuesday or Wednesday, and we were able to provision these devices and make them productive from day one.
Brubaker said VA’s motto extends not only to typical technological challenges, but to extraordinary events such as when Baylor University offered the agency a hospital for veterans infected with COVID.
He said VA OI&T equipped the hospital with network connections and other technology in weeks instead of three months or more.
“It was nothing short of magical how everyone came together. If you don’t think government agencies can be flexible and nimble and deploy quickly, this is a use case of foreground that we should be able to disabuse you of that notion, ”he said.“ We were able to speed up plans that we have had for the digital transformation of at least two years living this pandemic. I think we’ve done a pretty admirable job of staying ahead of demand and responding in such a way that when someone flips a switch they have the signal, can move the ones and zeros that they have. need to accomplish the mission. And it wasn’t just about accomplishing the mission, but it was really about measurably improving our mission and operational performance in the aftermath of this pandemic. So this is really good news.
Brubaker said what the pandemic has proven, once again, is the importance of linking IT investments to results. Brubaker, who helped draft the Clinger-Cohen Act while working for Sen. William Cohen (R-Maine), said all of the work around managing IT investments, capital planning and investment processes always comes down to ensuring mission effectiveness.
A flexible portfolio approach
One of the ways VA achieves this is through a portfolio management approach.
” We launched [on Sept. 22] our enterprise supply chain portfolio, where we assess our current environment because I think it’s really essential for us to be successful as an organization to really understand workflows, the reengineering of business processes that has where and how we apply this technology, ”Brubaker mentioned. “Now that doesn’t mean we’re not going to be burdened by an overly bureaucratic process that was invented 20 years ago. I think we have certain approaches that we have incorporated into our thinking and our strategy that will allow us to be quite agile, to adapt to short-term investments and new technologies.
Given the federal budget cycle and rapid changes in technology, he added that the portfolio management approach must be flexible to accommodate expected but unknown changes in technology and mission requirements.
An example of the agility Brubaker was talking about came at the start of the pandemic when veterans and their caregivers flooded the Veterans Health Administration call centers with questions.
Charles Worthington, VA’s chief technology officer, said that in addition to the call center upgrade, OI&T worked with VHA to develop a chatbot, the agency’s first, to address some of the issues. the most common.
“It went from an idea to something that went into production in about five weeks, and so far this chatbot has answered over 140,000 questions. Each time we can save a phone call that frees up staff to help someone with a more complicated problem, ”Worthington said. “Another of my favorite examples of the whole response was that the VHA facilities were trying to figure out how to operate safely during the height of the pandemic. They used to ask screening questions – and still do – at the front door for people to come in and just make sure that if anyone has symptoms, they are taken to a place where they can be further examined, evaluated further. Obviously, for our VHA staff who come and go from these facilities every day, it was becoming quite a cumbersome process to have to wait in that line and answer the same questions. One of our local medical centers identified this as a good issue that the software could have solved and created a small tool for their employees to answer screening questions and simply flash their phones. We heard about it, quickly grabbed it, kicked the tires on it, and scaled it up for any VA to use. This one went from that pilot that a medical center had created to a real live app that every medical center could use with the screening questions that had been sort of verified by the official COVID-19 main working group of VA, and has been deployed throughout the field. This screening tool has been used over 17 million times now. “
133 applications to the cloud
Part of the reason for VA ability to be agile comes from the work done in recent years to move to the cloud and modernize its technology.
Dr Neil Evans, chief executive of Connected Care and who serves as deputy secretary for information and technology and acting IT director, told House lawmakers on September 30 that VA has reduced its technical debt 10% on its common core technologies, including end-user devices, internet bandwidth and communication capabilities, since 2019.
Todd Simpson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of DevSecOps at VA, told the press conference that moving to the cloud has increased VA’s agility and security and helped them focus on mission results.
“We have moved 133 applications to the cloud; we have 82 in progress. There are still around 400 internally developed apps, but we’ve reduced our custom development from 57% in 2019 to 45% in 2021, ”said Simpson. “We continue to evolve into that model, where I think we get that security legacy through software as a service products and through commercial products (COTS) and through the cloud. “
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