Posted by Dana Louise Simberkoff, JD/CIPP, VP Public Sector, HiSoftware Inc.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) serves all 22 million of the United States’ veterans. This includes more than 3 million veterans who, as of November 2010, receive disability compensation and nearly 300,000 who qualify as 100% disabled. The agency also supports more than 350,000 employees, including approximately 26,000 who are disabled and need not only a physically accessible workplace, but an electronically accessible one as well.
Behind these numbers are some very real issues, and as the current administration encourages government agencies to move more and more content and services online, the challenges are more acute than ever. In addition to online accessibility concerns, which today are governed under Section 508, the VA must also ensure that all data collected – from both veterans and employees – is managed in compliance with evolving privacy regulations for personally identifiable information (PII) and protected healthcare information (PHI).
The VA has taken a highly progressive approach to these issues, and is partnering with HiSoftware on a major project to develop and implement a “best practices” approach to enterprise content compliance within their expansive SharePoint environment. This project includes an evaluation of the VA’s existing environment to determine how to best leverage the technology they have already deployed, as well as a forward look at how they should utilize SharePoint in the years ahead. This will include the development of a SharePoint 2010 model farm that will:
- Showcase the business applications of SharePoint across the agency today;
- Identify the appropriate agency polices for accessibility, privacy and information security within those business cases;
- Design a technical implementation model for how the VA will achieve those business and policy objectives through a combination of automation, oversight and enforcement.
This project is a major undertaking by the agency, and involves a broad spectrum of stakeholders across the policy, technology and business lines of the organization. The VA’s approach will not only provide great benefit to their veteran constituents and employees, but also to fellow agencies that will benefit from the VA team’s experience and lessons learned.
HiSoftware‘s role in the project, now in its second year following a 2010 pilot program, will address online accessibility and privacy within the VA’s SharePoint environment, as well as automated monitoring and reporting of their policies as they put them into practice across a number of SharePoint farms across the US.
For more information on HiSoftware’s support for the VA’s SharePoint compliance program, visit to: http://www.hisoftware.com/company/press-room/press-releases/11-09-21/US_Department_of_Veterans_Affairs_Awards_8_4_million_Contract_for_HiSoftware_s_Compliance_Sheriff_for_SharePoint.aspx