Ask the CIO

Robert Smith, the director of Department of the Navy’s Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, said the goal is to accelerate new or better capabilities to the sailor and marine.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Casey Cook, the cloud architecture branch chief for the Agriculture Department, said seven mission areas are taking advantage of more than 300 APIs to make data sharing among new and legacy systems easier.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lauren Knausenberger, the outgoing chief information officer of the Air Force, said if requested funding for fiscal 2024 comes through as hoped for, several transformation initiatives will get a much needed boost.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Holly Joers, the program executive officer for the Program Executive Office, Defense Healthcare Management Systems (PEO-DHMS), said DoD’s Cerner-based EHR, is now live at 75% of DoD’s clinics and hospitals, with 160,000 users and 6.1 million beneficiaries in the system so far.

Joers said DoD’s experience has been that the deployment process works much, much better once it’s moved beyond the first few sites. After that, a lot of lessons have been learned, and the institution can start to converge around change management and IT deployment practices that make sense for the whole enterprise.

“I can’t comment specifically on VA, but when I look at where they are now, I’m taken back to where DoD was in the 2017-2018 timeframe,” she said. “There were challenges with the network, and so we made rules about what infrastructure had to be in place before a go-live, and how long it needed to be stable before we went live. We looked at our governance and management process to hear different inputs. When you’re only dealing with four sites, everyone wants to make it work for what their workflow was before. So you really have to have the fortitude to look at making an enterprise standard, knowing that it might not match what they’re currently doing today. And we had to go through those growing pains.”

In the interview Joers also discussed:

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Agencies are buying professional services at a rate experts call “astonishing.”

The growth between 2021 and 2022 was unlike ever before. And half way into fiscal 2023, the spending data shows a continued increase.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Clare Martorana, the federal chief information officer chairwoman of the Technology Modernization Fund Board, and Raylene Yung, the executive director of the Technology Modernization Fund, say they are giving lawmakers more details and briefings about the progress and impact of the investments.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.