‘A lot to fix’: VA needs an IT program management office, CIO nominee says
The Veterans Affairs Department needs a technology program management office, and Gary Shatswell said he’s the man to do it in a Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday.
Shatswell, the nominee for the department’s CIO and information and technology assistant secretary, told the panel he is an industry-trained problem solver and, if confirmed, would make instituting a PMO one of his first tasks.
“We need a culture of transparency and accountability, achievable through agile program management, which will also accelerate mission delivery,” he said.
But that’s a promise the committee has heard before to no avail, said Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C.
“It is amazing how much money we are leaving on the floor by doing this in a Bush League way with one of the most large, consequential organizations in the U.S. government,” Tillis said.
Shatswell said there has been a lack of the “requisite tooling” and visibility around the PMO, but he’s the one to finally get it done. He would implement the “necessary” office because of his decades of experience as an industry executive, most recently as group chief information officer at Unilever Prestige, before joining the VA in December as a senior advisor.
“My lens coming in as an industry person, not as a government person, gives a unique perspective to the problems that often I would say suffer from short-sightedness, because often decisions are made from a political standpoint, and not a long-term True North plan,” he said. “I’m working to develop what would be that long-term plan, so that we have a True North over multiple administrations in the future.”
The nominee said there is “a lot to fix” in the “target-rich environment” that is the VA’s IT portfolio, but using an agile Scrum project management process at the office will “drive accountability at the individual worker level and it will drive visibility at the stakeholder level.”
In his opening statement, Shatswell also called for “bright-lined guardrails of security and privacy” around artificial intelligence and leveraging the VA’s enterprise data, particularly for data and records exchanged between the agency and the Defense Department.
“There are many [systems] and they don’t talk to each other, so there is a lot of work to build those bridges and to make the data flow,” he said, noting that a streamlined system is more secure and cost-saving. “One of my favorite things is turning things off.”
Shatswell was nominated in late April, and it has not yet been announced when his confirmation hearing will be held. He would replace the department’s Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence, who has been acting in the CIO role.
