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Today, many Veterans are already accustomed to a digital experience — whether that’s depositing a check from their phone, accessing their auto insurance card from an app, or chatting with a customer service rep via text — and they expect the same options from VA.
And for Veterans who physically interact with VA — whether coming into one of VA’s more than 1,200 health care facilities to receive care, or visiting a Vet Center to sign up for benefits, or meeting with a Veteran Service Organization for support representing their claim to VA — they expect the VA or VSO employee to be able to provide those services reliably, and that the complex, nationwide information systems that enable that service will work, every time.
To meet Veterans where they are, with reliability and with consistency, OIT must be single-minded in our focus on developing a clear vision for our work, creating priority-driven roadmaps, and executing with excellence, rigor, and consistency over time at every level.
We have to get back to basics and pursue excellence in organizational strategic planning, bringing rigorous discipline to how we prioritize requirements and allocate funding. We must examine how we engineer and maintain key IT products and services, avoid downtime, service our VA customers, and support top VA priorities such as Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM). We must also clearly articulate and deploy a strategy to secure and protect VA’s vital infrastructure and our Veterans’ information.
While we do this, we must never lose sight of the exceptional customer experiences we’re trying to create with our products and services. And finally, we should be the government leader in promoting diversity and inclusion among our team, so that we can represent the diversity of our customers, create a workplace where people feel welcome and supported, and be a destination that attracts the very best talent.
To accomplish this, we must lead with vision, connect the vision to clear plans with measures for success, and achieve those through relentless execution.
The following priorities outline our vision for making the Office of Information and Technology the leading government IT organization:
Vision-driven Execution: Vision connected to plans connected to execution. We will develop vision and 2-to-3-year roadmaps at each Portfolio and Product Line, which will also include clear measures of success.
Operational Excellence: Fundamentally, the primary reason OIT exists is to build and operate IT products that are highly available with world-class reliability and uptime. The foundation of true operational excellence includes the following three components:
- Engineering Excellence: We will establish a process of continuous improvement in how we execute our engineering processes, including redundancy, failover, monitoring, modern design patterns, etc.
- Security Excellence: We will establish a clear security strategy founded around the Zero Trust Architecture and will identify and execute on a clear, risk-based roadmap that implements the key pillars of that strategy.
- Effective Resource Allocation: We will institute a culture of relentless prioritization so we allocate resources effectively.
Delightful End User Experience: We will continue to pursue nothing less than an exceptional customer experience for the end-users of our products and services at VA.
People Excellence: We will create fulfilling career pathways and improve recruitment, and we will celebrate diversity, inclusivity, and accessibility.
Read more about our Digital Transformation.
