VA INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. Progress Made, But Continued Management Attention is Key to Achieving Results

Over the past year, VA has clearly benefited from the commitment of the secretary and other top leaders to addressing critical weaknesses in the departments management of information technology. As a result of their leadership, VA has made important strides in raising corporate awareness of the departments needs and in articulating and acting upon a vision for achieving improvements in key areas of IT performance. Despite this progress, however, many aspects of VAs IT environment remain troublesome, and our message today reflects concerns that we have long viewed as significant impediments to the departments effective use of IT to achieve optimal agency performance. As such, VA has more work to accomplish before it can point to real improvement in overall program performance and be assured that IT has a stable, reliable, and modernized systems environment to effectively support critical agency decision making and operations. In an area of growing importance, VA has taken key steps in laying the groundwork for an integrated, department wide enterprise architecture--a blueprint for evolving its information systems and developing new systems that optimize their mission value. Crucial executive support has been established and the department has put in place a strategy to define products and processes that are critical to its development. VA is also currently recruiting a chief architect to assist in implementing and managing the enterprise architecture. Significant work, nonetheless, is still required before the department will have a functioning enterprise architecture in place for acquiring and utilizing information systems across VA in a cost-effective and efficient manner.