The Veterans Affairs Department will have no more "hundred million dollar" IT project failures, VA's chief information officer told senators who oversee the VA.
At a hearing this week, members of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee made it clear that they want to keep a spotlight on VA's IT management practices in view of the agency's mixed record meeting production and efficiency targets. Roger Baker, VA's chief information officer, who's been on the job for 16 months, said the agency is not where it should be. He described efforts at VA to instill better project management procedure.
While the VA has been a leader in putting electronic health record technology in place, it has stumbled on its way to an electronic VA, according to committee's chairman, Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii).
Akaka pointed out that last summer the VA halted 45 projects, "that were dramatically over budget and overdue, including an outpatient scheduling system that was three years overdue."
Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) decried the fact that in his few months in the Senate he has learned that, "we waste a tremendous amount of money beginning programs, putting a few hundred million dollars in it and then, you say, ah, that doesn't work, we will do something else.
When Baker was asked if he has the IT systems in place to do his job, he replied, "absolutely not," noting he was answering with perspective from his commercial sector experience.
"I very early learned to separate (VA's) customer support and operations, which are on a par with the private sector, from our development, which is far behind what private sector organizations can do," said Baker, who is VA's assistant secretary for information and technology.
"We are putting in the disciplines in our developmental organization that a private sector organization would expect, but frankly we have nearly 3,000 developers," he said. VA spends about $800 million a year on development.
"And while we have started to change that organization, we are nowhere close to the level of output I would expect from that level of investment," he added.
Baker pledged that although the agency will take some risks in the future, "we will not have another hundred million dollar, go-off-and-spend-money-and-fail program in the VA."
He vowed to "stop things early before they turn into big losses. That is the way that the private sector approaches these things."
Of the projects halted last summer, Baker said he canceled 12 and restructured 33. All major IT projects must use the Program Management Accountability System (PMAS) to assure that they deliver products and services on time, he said.
In light of tight federal budgets, Baker said he had requested no increase for fiscal year 2011 and does not anticipate the VA requesting an IT increase for 2012 either. He is focused on projects that will benefit veterans and on getting more out of the level of funding the agency has.
In addition to tight budgets, the lack of project management skills at VA has also caused Baker to cut back on the number of projects. "One of the primary premises of the (PMAS) is we are not going to ask a project manager to start a project when he or she already knows it's going to fail," he said.
