"There was commitment at the executive level to have reform," he said. "But the attitude was to fix it within the current processes." The highly siloed nature of operations at the VA also created an "onerous concurrence process" which often delayed projects, he said.

Robert McFarland, who took over as the CIO of VA in February 2004 and resigned this past April, said that the VA's "long-standing history of decentralized management" made it resistant to change.

Prior to quitting in frustration, McFarland had been trying to implement a new "federated" IT management system at the VA that was designed to cut costs and improve efficiencies.

The reorganization was approved by VA Secretary Jim Nicholson last October and involved the separation of the IT organization at the agency into two separate domains; an operations and maintenance domain directly under the control of the CIO and an application development domain supported by the VA's health, benefits and cemetery administrations and staff offices. As part of the reorganization, Congress last fall passed a bill consolidating all IT spending at the VA under a single CIO.

The changes have allowed for better oversight of IT spending and a move towards a consolidation of the IT infrastructure at VA, McFarland said. "I believe that if you don't consolidate the infrastructure under the CIO..., you can't ensure that the environment is safe," he said.