Executing against myriad daily deliverables that are not connected to comprehensive plans, which in turn lack clearly articulated vision, wastes time, money, and the good faith of our stakeholders. Every dollar not spent on the mission is detracting from our ability to deliver services to Veterans. We must be trustworthy stewards of resources and advocate for mission-driven decisions.

Each team will have a clearly articulated vision for the products and services they deliver. That vision will connect with an explicit multi-year roadmap and outcomes-based progress metrics, aligned with stakeholder expectations and consistent with current resource constraints.

  • Each OIT portfolio area and product line will have a forward-looking vision, strategy, 2- to 3-year roadmap, and clear measures of success. We will continue and strengthen our agile development approach while making sure that each deliverable is informed by the portfolio and product line’s vision and roadmap.
  • Each of these roadmaps will articulate concise, clear priorities, highlighting what we are and are not delivering, in order to determine any potential dependencies or organization impacts. We will iterate on these priorities over time, keeping them up to date, so we can prioritize new requirements in the context of all the work we have to do, improving the quality of our trade-off discussions with stakeholders.
  • The priorities and roadmaps will be connected to clear resource allocation plans. We will look for places that are chronically under-resourced and seek solutions through moving resources from other places or soliciting more investment from our administration and legislatures.

We will establish OIT-wide performance scorecards that measure key, outcome-impacting operational metrics that enable continuous improvement, and we will codify our operating model — how we work — across the entire organization. This will include systems development, organization operation and employee roles, and support systems.

We will continue to deliver the technical capabilities necessary to implement VA’s strategic plan, including far-reaching and highly visible efforts including:

  • Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM)
  • Financial management systems (Integrated Financial and Acquisition Management System (iFAMS) and Financial Management Business Transformation (FMBT))
  • Human capital management systems
  • Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support (DMLSS) and VA supply chain transformation
  • Asset and Infrastructure Review (AIR) Commission to realign and modernize health care system

Lastly, we will build and deploy a plan for a common VA data architecture and strategy, treating data as a strategic asset. We will ensure that VA employees such as clinicians, benefits administrators, technicians, and researchers have access to the right data and insights, in the right place, and at the right time, to make data-driven decisions in the best interest of VA and the Veterans VA serves. This work includes:

  • Standing up a modern cloud-based Data Analytics environment, and scaling this to an enterprise data platform
  • Enhancing our Data and Analytics Product Line with oversight of all IT investment in Data, and governance by key stakeholders
  • Standing up the Center of Excellence for Data Science
  • Building and deploying a DOD-VA data strategy