The Veterans Affairs Department is embracing a new attitude, with plans to better engage VA employees and better meet veterans' needs, according to several VA officials during an address at HCI-DC in Washington on Oct. 12.

"VA is in need of change," said Scott Gould, deputy secretary at the VA. That means "changing the culture at VA from adversary to advocate."

Within the department, employees have felt that innovation is discouraged, said Peter Levin, VA chief technology officer at VA. To reverse that reputation, the VA launched in June a web-based idea collection tool as part of the VA Innovation Initiative, or VAi2. This portal facilitated the generation of 10,000 ideas from VA workers on how to improve the department. According to Gould, VA has taken the best suggestions and is now implementing them. Employees with ideas that were still strong, but didn't make the top 25 list for implementation, were contacted by VA and encouraged to work with their first- and second-tier supervisors to get their idea implemented, Gould said.

For a long time, the federal government has depended on this "proprietary, custom, closed architecture," said Levin. Part of the VA's cultural transformation is moving to a "modular, scalable, extensible, repairable, openly-architected standard way of doing things."

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