VA deputy CIO resigns

Lorraine Landfried, deputy CIO for product development at the Department of Veterans Affairs, has submitted her resignation, FCW has learned.

Landfried plans to leave the agency July 19 and is launching her own business with the working title of Landfried Government Solutions. While Landfried can't officially hang out a shingle while she still works for the government, she told FCW she plans to do strategic consulting, executive coaching and advisory services that will draw on her decades-long career in government.

"I'm very excited. I've been a civil servant since I was 21, so I'm definitely ready to try something new," Landfried said.

Landried joined the VA in 2009. Previously, she had worked at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office for Information and Technology as executive director of enterprise data management and engineering. She started her government career as a computer programmer at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Landfried won a Federal 100 award in 2013, when she was cited for improving the VA's "on time" program delivery rate to 89 percent, a dramatic improvement over previous performance by the VA's Office of Information Technology. She also helped put development at VA on an agile footing, and is involved in government-wide efforts to spread the agile development method across agencies.

Her departure comes amid major changes at the top level of VA. Former Procter & Gamble CEO Bob McDonald was tapped by President Barack Obama to lead the agency after Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned over persistent problems and workarounds in scheduling medical appointments. The VA's OIT, meanwhile, is in the midst of a procurement of a new commercial scheduling system to interface with the agency's home-grown electronic health record, VistA.

Landfried said she is confident that the VA will be able to tap its agile expertise to fix the scheduling problems, and give managers more oversight and visibility into the system. There are interim fixes in the works that will improve how end users see available appointments, Landfried said, and those short improvements will help pave the way for eventually integrating a commercial system into VistA.

"There's no reason to think it won't be successful, because every time we've used that [agile] approach, it has been successful," she told FCW.