VA Gives the Go Ahead to its 'Ruthless' IT Reduction Plans

Don't be surprised to see Roger Baker and Stephen Warren walk around the Veterans Affairs Department in the coming months and personally remove printers from desks.
Baker, VA's assistant secretary in the Office of Information and Technology and chief information officer, and Warren, the principal deputy assistant secretary in the office of information and technology and principal deputy chief information officer, are putting into action the recommendations made by the Ruthless Reduction Task Force to squeeze more savings out of their technology spend.

VA's IT budget was $3.1 billion in 2011 and the agency requested about the same for 2012. The task force submitted its final recommendations — a 104-page report — to Baker and Warren earlier this month detailing IT areas that are ripe within VA to reduce spending.

"We pulled our senior staff together and said 'the [budget] wall is coming,'" Warren said. "We had been fortunate we'd been running on a reasonable budget path, but we saw where things were going and we needed to make sure we were efficiently utilizing all the resources we had. We told them to leave no rock unturned."