Department of Veterans Affairs
The VA was one of the biggest recipients of relief money under the CARES Act, and it put that to good use supporting rapid scaling of telework, among other things. Former CIO Jim Gfrerer said last year the VA put “every penny” of the more than $2 billion it received for things like telework and telehealth to “effective use.” Prior to the pandemic, the VA was “very much an on-premise agency,” Gfrerer said, meaning most employees work physically in a department office day-to-day. But when the crisis hit, that changed in short order. Gfrerer said the VA was responsible for one of the largest “single-day deployments of Microsoft Teams,” rolling out the tool to more than 400,000 users in rapid fashion.
