The Endless War

Veteran IT watchers who caught the webcast of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee last week saw something all too familiar.

The IT history of the Veterans Affairs Department has been one of intermittent battling between two groups: One is the programmers and clinicians who, starting in the late 1970s, built their public-domain IT system from scratch. The other side is composed of political and bureaucratic supporters of a centralized command-and-control IT bureaucracy who have sought to thwart the home-grown effort, typically in favor of purchasing or programming software from the commercial market.

That dichotomy resurfaced at the Oct. 6 hearing.