Farewell and Reflection on the Incredible Progress VA and OIT Have Made Over the Past Several Years

As I leave my role as the VA Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology and Chief Information Officer (CIO), I reflect on what an honor it has been to have led one of the U.S. government’s most impactful missions. 

I’ve served at VA for 3 years — longer than any VA CIO over the past decade. During this time, I’ve come to appreciate the immense complexity and inspiring mission of VA’s Office of Information and Technology. I’m biased, but I believe VA is one of the best places — if not the best — to be in federal IT. At OIT’s core are our people, who are dedicated to serving veterans and to public service. These folks are the best of the best. This excellence comes through in the annual GSA/OMB IT Customer Satisfaction Survey, in which we recently ranked best IT organization in government for the fourth consecutive year — no small feat. We face a lot of challenges, but I’m proud of our record and our mission: serving those who served us with exceptional IT products and services.

Our journey over the past 3 years has been energizing and, at times, daunting. VA actively cares for over 9 million Veterans as the single largest integrated health care provider in the country, and we manage a vast array of services, from delivering disability compensation and college benefits to administering insurance policies and serving home loan participants. This complexity can be challenging, but it also presents countless opportunities to add value and enable greater care for those we serve.

To navigate this complexity, we established a North Star for our team defined by four key principles: Be Vision-Focused, Invest in Operational Excellence, Create Delightful End User Experiences, and Champion People Excellence. These principles have guided us in moving away from the old “IT as order takers” mentality to becoming strategic leaders who deeply understand and address the critical processes that drive our mission.

We’ve also driven greater clarity in our approach to cybersecurity, embracing Zero Trust as the essence of our strategy and investing in proactive measures to safeguard our systems. We’ve leveraged tools like MVPs, FITARA and ATOs to ensure our investments make sense and our systems operate reliably. And we’ve piloted AI tools that position VA to be a government leader in the ethical use of transformational AI that delivers results in minutes, not months.

We’ve spent a lot of effort over the past 3 years shifting OIT to act as a product group, focusing on delivering solutions for our business partners that result in exceptional customer experiences. I believe this focus reflects how the best IT companies should run their own operations. They put the customer first, deliver high-quality products, focus relentlessly on operational excellence, and create user experiences that customers love. As we’ve shifted our focus here at VA to operating IT as a product group, there are a number of observations that I leave for my successor:

• “Big bang” rip-and-replace projects are one of the most perilous endeavors our IT industry takes on, and they frequently fail. Instead of investing in brand new replacement systems, we must focus on continuously modernizing our systems, iteratively improving them so that they are always modern.
• We must evolve from holding teams accountable to the tried-and-true federal acquisition measures of “cost, schedule, and performance.” We must instead measure them by the progress they make in delivering on stakeholder needs and on enabling “the business.”
• Too often, scorecard metrics point perpetually “up and to the right.” It’s easy to measure the number of new features we add to an application or the number of routers we upgrade, for example. We should instead establish goals based on stakeholder needs and measure how close we are to accomplishing those goals.
• In serving our stakeholders, we create an incredibly complex environment of interdependent systems that are prone to failure.  Great IT leaders obsess over the details and encourage their teams to do likewise.  They constantly worry that the next failure is just around the corner, so they embrace a culture of continuously and relentlessly searching out vulnerabilities and remediating them.  They measure what matters and regularly establish OKRs to guide and assess their progress.
• We recognize that full-time federal tech resources are in scarce supply in the market. As a result, we will continue to depend heavily on contractors to deliver on our mission, and we embrace them as members of one team. To do this effectively, we conduct detailed project reviews and plan jointly. We are clear on who is responsible for what, and we work together to continuously improve our technical rigor as a single Product Group at VA.
• When an issue arises as part of a team, it’s a shared problem, even if you’re the only one who knows about it. We all fear that admitting to the issue will negatively impact our review, compensation, or promotion. Our natural first reaction is “better to not talk about it.” At VA, we’ve adopted a mantra of “Embrace the Red.” Rather than hide issues from the rest of the team, we encourage people to bring them forward, so we can solve them together.

As I step down and welcome the new political appointee, I do so with a heart full of gratitude and excitement to see the team’s continued success. Our Nation’s Veterans deserve nothing less. I’m excited to see our early efforts to operate IT as a product group come to fruition, and I look forward to following your progress. Thank you to everyone who has been part of this journey. Your hard work, talent, and commitment to our mission have been nothing short of extraordinary. Together, we’ve laid a strong foundation for the future, and I am confident that VA’s Office of Information and Technology will continue to set the example as the best IT organization in government.

Thank you for the opportunity to serve.