VA Is Developing Balanced Scorecard for Modernization Initiatives

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) IT Office has announced the development of a balanced scorecard to measure the agency’s ability to manage modernization efforts. As the VA undergoes a cloud-driven transformation across their components, the scorecard will measure accomplishments and opportunity areas.

The VA Chief Information Officer (CIO) James Gfrerer told FedScoop last week that his office is near ready to launch the scorecard to measure the success of the agency’s various digital transformation efforts, including the modernization of electronic health records, medical logistics supply, human resources, and financial management systems.

CIO Gfrerer briefed Congress on the scorecards developments later that week.

“We are about 75% to 80% complete on our balanced scorecard that supports our digital transformation strategy,” Gfrerer said. “So we’re going to get a lot more focused around those measures, those metrics, those outcomes around the specific projects and start to be a bit more deliberate on what programs are succeeding or not.”

Gfrerer acknowledged the agency’s “checkered past” in terms of developing and completing projects on major IT systems. The scorecard is meant to assist the agency in assessing a system’s progress and making a decision more quickly if something is not working properly.

The VA is currently preparing to go live in March with their new Cerner-based Electronic Health Record Modernization program at VA hospitals in the Pacific Northwest. The scorecard is expected to assist with this rollout.

The scorecard will also assist as the agency works to migrate its application to an enterprise cloud environment.

By 2024, Gfrerer says the department hopes to move 350 of the department’s applications and systems- about half of its total portfolio- to the enterprise cloud. The department has developed a methodology for scoring and prioritizing application transfers.

“If something is in a particular aging environment or is suffering from some other software or hardware maladies, we’re going to probably put it high in the queue in terms of getting it into a more accessible and responsive infrastructure in the cloud,” Gfrerer said.

The idea of a balanced scorecard comes from the private sector, in which balanced scorecards are used to measure lagging and leading indicators for accomplishing financial goals.