Information Technology: Veterans Affairs Can Further Improve Its Development Process for Its New Education Benefits System

Abstract

The Post-9/11 GI Bill was signed into law in June 2008 and provides educational assistance for veterans and members of the armed forces who served on or after September 11, 2001. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is responsible for processing claims for these new education benefits. VA concluded that its legacy systems and manual processes were insufficient to support the new benefits and, therefore, began an initiative to modernize its benefits processing capabilities. The long-term solution was to provide a fully automated end-to- end information technology (IT) system to support the delivery of benefits by December 2010. VA chose an incremental development approach, called Agile software development, which is intended to deliver functionality in short increments before the system is fully deployed. GAO was asked to (1) determine the status of VA's development and implementation of its IT system to support the implementation of education benefits identified in the Post-9/11 GI Bill and (2) evaluate the department's effectiveness in managing its IT project for this initiative.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA533946

Entities

Organizations

  • United States Government Accountability Office

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Agile Software Development
  • Business Administration
  • Congress
  • Department Of Veterans Affairs
  • Education
  • Engineering
  • Governments
  • House Of Representatives
  • Information Systems
  • Law
  • Lessons Learned
  • Management Personnel
  • Organizational Structure
  • Project Management
  • Software Development
  • United States
  • United States Government

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Defense Financial Management and Audit.
  • Defense Technology Research and Development.
  • Mental Health of Military Veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Risk Factors, Prevalence, Symptoms, and Treatment.