Accenture Federal Services will provide a variety of IT services to help the Department of Veterans Affairs respond to the coronavirus pandemic as part of a $96 million task order for modernization services.
To assist in the VA’s response to COVID-19, Accenture will help the VA track mobile network equipment for clinicians “to enhance their connectivity” and distribute additional laptops to teleworking employees. The company will also provide a service that allows VA workers to reset passwords themselves.
Accenture will also help the VA’s Service Management Office, or SMO, improve its chat bots “to improve self-help capabilities and enable end users to find solutions faster and allow help desk personnel to focus on more complex requests."
“AFS will work with VA to help the agency automate manual workflows and introduce applied intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities to allow VA’s workforce to focus on more complex tasks that serve Veterans,” a news release from Accenture said.
The contract performance period is five years.
Outside of the coronavirus response, the company will also partner with the VA’s SMO to increase the office’s visibility into the IT infrastructure of mission-critical services. The service is expected to allow the VA to identify and respond to operational and security incidents more quickly.
As part of the modernization effort, the VA Central Office, the Veterans Health Administration, the Veterans Benefits Administration and the National Cemetery Administration will use Accenture’s ServiceNow platform.
"Accenture Federal Services is proud to help VA seamlessly transition its existing service management tools to both improve the user experience and increase the business value of solutions,” said Shawn Roman, a managing director at Accenture who leads the company’s work with VA. “Working with the Service Management Office, we will use human-centered design thinking methods to put the Veteran, clinician, and VA employees at the center of how services are designed and created.”
Andrew Eversden covers all things defense technology for C4ISRNET. He previously reported on federal IT and cybersecurity for Federal Times and Fifth Domain, and worked as a congressional reporting fellow for the Texas Tribune. He was also a Washington intern for the Durango Herald. Andrew is a graduate of American University.
