The CIO Blog

A conversation from the chat logs of the Department of Veterans Affairs Assistant Secretary of Information and Technology and Chief Information Officer Kurt DelBene and Chief Technology Officer and Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Charles Worthington.

VA is one of the best places — if not the best — to be in federal IT. It has an incredibly inspiring mission, and it has great people committed to service.

Ever wondered why some organizations consistently outperform others? It’s all about setting and measuring the right goals. In OIT, our OKRs keep us on track and drive excellence. Learn how we’re making strides to be the top IT organization in the Federal Government!

OIT's daily standup? It's where we crack the code on incidents and plan ahead—making things better for our Veterans! Learn how we do it.

Digital transformation across industry over the last decade has profoundly impacted consumers’ lives and their expectations of access to services. Increasingly, people expect that same sort of fast, intuitive interaction with their government.

In OIT, we often talk about the idea of delivering on VA’s digital transformation by getting “Back to Basics.” That can seem like we’re going backward versus moving new innovation forward. What we mean by this is that …

At the end of the day, I believe today’s IT organization must operate as a technology product group, and our success depends upon putting the right teams in place, giving them the tools they need to do the job, communicating to them the vision of where we need to go, and then getting out of their way.

Managing IT systems at VA is a massively challenging endeavor.

While it’s a simple concept, it can be hard in practice. All of us must feel confident that we aren’t going to be unfairly penalized for bringing forward a problem.

When you think about the structure of most product and development teams within the commercial space, they act as a single team. We also must do this in the federal environment, even though a lot of our work is outsourced.

VA embraced Zero Trust Architecture as our cybersecurity framework because it is powerful. It is comprehensive yet simple to understand. At its heart, it has a simple premise: assume you’ll be breached and then ask, “What can they get their hands on?”.

The software and hardware systems we create are remarkably complex. They were built by mere mortals, so many defects were unintentionally designed in. In addition, while software doesn’t age, hardware does, inducing even more failures.

Too often, I see scorecards where the metrics point perpetually “up and to the right.” Often that’s because the metric tracks activities rather than actual progress toward goals. It’s easy to measure the number of features we added to an application or the number of routers we upgrade, for example. What we should be asking and measuring is what goal we are trying to achieve for stakeholders and how close we are to achieving that goal.

What doesn’t work as well in this model is holding teams strictly accountable to the tried-and-true measures of “cost, schedule, and performance.” Teams should create vision and connected product plans, but if we encourage them to adjust those plans over time in response to their progress and shifting stakeholder needs so that they ultimately hit that ever shifting “true north,” then we cannot also hold them strictly accountable to a detailed schedule that they set out well in advance.

The remedy you often hear espoused is that IT organizations should “partner with the business.” I never quite know what that means.

To increase the collaboration among the teams and to create a strong, integrated senior leadership team, we removed these extra layers and created a flat organization structure.

“Big bang” rip-and-replace projects are one of the most perilous endeavors our IT industry takes on, and they frequently fail.

The phrase “Digital Transformation” is often overused in the tech industry. It’s hard to define because it seems to mean something different to everyone. At its heart, it recognizes that modern digital systems no longer play a mere support role in operating an organization – they are at the very heart of executing on the organization’s core mission. For organizations like VA, technology is not just about administrative systems and spreadsheets; it’s the engine that powers the agency’s most critical services.