As the Department of Veterans Affairs implements its “vision-first” strategy, CIO Kurt DelBene said he’s focusing on bolstering cybersecurity and automation.
“There’s nothing more important than cybersecurity,” DelBene said during Digital Government Institute’s 930gov conference Tuesday. “Just getting people to understand that even before that next feature, being secure is what’s more important … cybersecurity needs to be a single kind of dial tone that always works.” …
“One of the transformations we’re trying to drive at VA is it’s great to have all the processes to say, ‘Yes, you have engineered around being secure,’ but there has to be a checkpoint — whether it’s FITARA, whether it’s an ATO process — that says, ‘I believe this is a secure system that can be put on the network,’” DelBene said…
In order to have digital transformation at the core of VA, DelBene said the agency must “think like an engineering organization” that revolves around a vision of end user experience across the enterprise.
“Modernization is in service of a goal,” DelBene said. “You have to assert it as a mission because we’re going to need it over time to modernize as a core part of what you do, and that is part of your vision to ultimately keep modern systems such that you’re always driving higher reliability, higher responsiveness.” … Read the full article here.
