VA Interoperability Maturity Self-Assessment Survey

VA Interoperability Organizational Framework establishes an enterprise-wide understanding of interoperability. The Framework lists 28 specific elements across VA’s three framework pillars: Business (13), Data and Information (9), and Systems and Technology (6). Interoperability Foundational Elements support interoperability in the three framework pillars and leverages an Interoperability Maturity Assessment process to evaluate the interoperability posture of a business workflow.

Consists of the elements of a Veteran’s environment from legislative, regulatory, health care, and community, where IT systems need to be deployed to improve delivery of business value. This requires agreement on key organizational concepts such as roles, policies, and processes as well as capture of relevant organizational patterns such as legislative compliance, governance, and change management. 

Data and information is how functional, administrative, or statistical information can be represented and interpreted. Information is any kind of knowledge that is exchanged among users, about things, facts, concepts and so on, in a Universe of Discourse [ISO/IEC10746-2]. This requires agreement on a core set of information concepts, such as information components and relationships between components, as well as capture of relevant information patterns such as information rights, information quality, and scope of application.

VA’s Systems and Technology Pillar is about the technical functionality for delivering interoperability. This requires agreement on a core set of technical concepts, such as technical service, interface, technical components, and interactions, as well as capture of relevant technical patterns such as styles of component interactions and technical architecture styles.

How to use this survey:  Start with mapping out your business workflow and identifying the current state of your business outcomes. Identify and consider all the business aspects, data, and systems that are part of the workflow.  Complete an assessment for all the 28 elements on a scale starting from 0 (none) to five (optimized).  The score should reflect the lowest scoring aspect of the workflow (e.g., poorest performing system).