The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) update on the “MyVA” transformation shows progress in serving veterans. This is the third update of the semi-annual report on the effort to make VA the No. 1 customer-service agency in the Federal government. […]
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Veterans Affairs
Just weeks before senior officials at the Veterans Health Administration ordered the launch of a new Online Health Care Application through Vets.gov, a senior policy adviser at the White House warned VHA officials that the new app had not been cleared by agency lawyers because of legal and technical issues that, ultimately, affected veteran enrollment across the nation. […]
In his Monday report on the status of the White House Cancer Moonshot, Vice President Joe Biden listed big data and data sharing as key components in today’s fight against cancer. […]
Kavi Harshawat, a member of the U.S. Digital Service working at the VA, drops some truth about government work….Some good news and personnel info at VA. […]
New roles and transformation progress at VA….Eating crow….IBM is watching….Gone fishing. […]
Catch up on some reading this weekend. Here are a few interesting items from MeriTalk. […]
Federal CIO Tony Scott will again lay out his vision for the $3.1 billion IT modernization fund on July 14 at the Palo Alto Networks Federal Forum. MeriTalk has launched the #GreatScott campaign—an online petition to keep Scott in office through the transition of administrations. Scott’s presence and leadership may be the key to making the fund a reality….CIA’s investments could pay for that modernization campaign….At VA, confusion about what’s a medical device and what’s IT. […]
Federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott will soon announce his pick as the first Federal chief information security officer. Brian Burns is exiting as CISO at VA. Are these things related?…Speaking of VA, personal data has a way of being carelessly handled. […]
Congress has passed an appropriations bill to fund increased medical care for military veterans–particularly women–a burgeoning contingent of the vet population. The bill contains language that presses the VA to improve health care for female veterans by considering the launch of a mobile health care pilot program. […]
The Government Accountability Office released a report detailing the 10 key practices agencies should follow in creating service level agreements (SLA) with cloud service providers. […]
Haley Van Dyck, the co-founder of the U.S. Digital Service, brought the U.S. government’s unique brand of startup to a new TED Talk. Filmed in February in Vancouver, British Columbia, and released this week, Van Dyck’s talk urged technology entrepreneurs to disrupt their government by introducing technologies most of us take for granted. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs is moving aggressively to institute a new system to plan and manage IT projects, effectively replacing the agile development methodology championed by former chief information officers Roger Baker and Stephen Warren. VA CIO LaVerne Council told a MyVA Advisory Committee meeting last week that she has hired the second of three senior executives to lead the new IT Account Management organization. […]
Juniper Networks announced that it has been selected as the original equipment manufacturer on four contracts to modernize the U.S. Air Force network infrastructure, partnering with Affigent and ThunderCat Technology. […]
The Veterans Benefits Administration is falling short in the way it is managing the progress of its Veteran’s Benefits Management System (VBMS), a system that was responsible for processing $63 billion in claims in 2014, Valerie Melvin, director of information technology at the Government Accountability Office, told the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. […]
A MeriTalk survey finds that Federal agencies are in need of an efficiency jump-start, and 78 percent of Feds believe DevOps will help agencies innovate faster responses and services. Legacy systems are slowing agencies down, and new apps just add to the inertia. […]
The 34-page Protected Health Information (PHI) Data Breach Report analyzed 392 million security incidents and 1,931 data breaches, including breaches at the Department of Health and Human Services and a “significant number of records” from the Department of Veterans Affairs. […]
With new authority comes greater accountability. See how that applies to the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA). […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs awarded a little-known contract Tuesday for virtual reality software that could one day have a dramatic impact on the ability of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to deal with the various symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In a relatively small contract of just $77,496, the VA partnered with the […]
Department of Veterans Affairs Chief Information Officer LaVerne Council announced Nov. 6 that Brian Burns has accepted an offer to become the agency’s next chief information security officer. Burns takes over for Dan Galik, who has served as acting CISO since Stan Lowe retired in August. Burns will also continue in his role as deputy […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs appointed Brian Burns to lead its new Enterprise Cybersecurity Strategy. […]
A new study mandated by Congress in the wake of the secret waiting list scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs has uncovered significant evidence that the department’s IT leaders have for years failed to meet the technology needs of clinical professionals treating veterans on the front lines and that those IT failures, along with […]
As many as 50,000 Department of Veterans Affairs employees took part in an unauthorized internal social network that may have compromised VA data as far back as 2008, according to the results of an investigation released today. In a heavily-redacted 21-page report, released Thursday in response to a Freedom of Information Action request by MeriTalk, […]
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The Department of Veterans Affairs has named Dan Galik to be the agency’s new acting chief information security officer, MeriTalk has learned. Galik, VA’s former Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Security Operations, will replace Stan Lowe, who announced his retirement on Aug. 7. “Daniel Galik will serve as Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary and Chief Information […]