VA Technology Office Makes Room for New Vendors to Prove Value

Key goals for the VA acquisition plans include boosting innovation and building up the vendor pipeline, chief information officer Kurt DelBene said at a media roundtable Tuesday.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is looking to change the way it works with smaller companies and non-traditional vendors.

“We want to bring more and more of them into the ecosystem,” DelBene said about the Office of Information and Technology. “If they can prove themselves and then scale up and do more and more with us over time.”

Contractors make up roughly 85% of the VA’s work, DelBene said. In order to see ...