MeriTalk recently sat down with Dewaine Beard, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (PDAS) in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Information and Technology (OIT), to talk all things IT modernization and workforce.
Beard serves as the Deputy Chief Information Officer (DCIO) for OIT under Kurt DelBene, who joined VA in January 2022 as the agency’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Assistant Secretary for Information Technology…
MeriTalk: This next question is a little broad, but how can the VA improve its IT modernization efforts? In order to get into a more constant modernization pace – as opposed to a Big Bang modernization, as Kurt DelBene has called it in the past – what does the VA need? Is that more funding, people, etc.?
Beard: I think it’s an exceptional question, because it goes to the heart of what Kurt and I and the other executives have been doing for a while. Even before Kurt joined us, we were involved in transforming from that traditional Big Bang, heavy lift and shift, waterfall kind of development model to an agile or DevSecOps model of development. So, modern tool chains, continuous deployment of product – that has just increased. We actually have measurements in place internally, where we’re measuring the maturity of each of our product teams by how well they are delivering and migrating away from those old methodologies to the new ones. How many are adopting the new tool chains? How quick are their release cycles? What’s their defect for release rate? And that’s really maturing our teams and changing the way we do our work… Read the full article here.
