It takes hard-boiled technology to make a people-friendly agency

At an agency as big as Veterans Affairs, modernizing and updating just about everything … it’s a never-ending task. VA has big and ongoing human resources needs. And a need to modernize the systems connected to hiring and retaining humans. For an update, we turn to a VA executive with two titles … deputy chief information officer and chief people officer. Nathan Tierney joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript: 

Tom Temin
At an agency as big as Veterans Affairs, modernizing and updating just about everything. It’s a never-ending task. VA has big and ongoing human resources need and a need to modernize the systems connected to hiring and retaining humans for an update, we turn to a VA executive with two titles, Deputy Chief Information Officer and Chief People Officer. Nathan Tierney joins me now.  And I want to start with your title. You’re the Chief People Officer of the Office of Technology, the whole that channel of VA.

Nathan Tierney
Yes, within VA, Office of Information Technology, I’m the Chief People Officer.

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Tom Temin
And how many people are you the Officer Chief of?

Nathan Tierney
We have about 8000 employees right now, geographically dispersed, supporting our veterans in a variety of different ways, and to about over 3000 different sites that can be regional benefit centers, medical centers, etc.

Tom Temin
So that office then would be a medium sized agency all by itself?

Nathan Tierney
It really would be. But again, you know, for the mission we do, everything you touch today has technology, and so we invest heavily in technology to serve veterans, their families and caregivers.

Tom Temin
What are you doing on the forefront of modernizing the HR systems that you support to keep VA with the people it needs throughout the organization?

Nathan Tierney
Right now, we have a foundational human resource system right that supports our workforce, and not just for the Office of Information Technology, but for the VA at large, which consists of over 400,000 employees. However, you know, we have to race ahead of technology versus behind it, and we need to modernize those systems. So what we’re doing is we’re going to leverage some advanced technologies. We’re streamlining our processes. We’re ensuring that we have interoperable systems between what we call like an HR smart system, which deals with your more HR transactions, to creating a talent experience portal for the employees and the managers to help point them in the right direction for those things that they may need in their job and their professional careers, and this modernization effort really is going to be helpful in automating right routine tasks, improving our data accuracy, protecting it from a cybersecurity perspective as well. And then I’m also looking forward to how we get actual insights to drive decision making through what I like to refer to as a common operating picture, right? So as we standardize how we receive, analyze and disseminate information as it relates to the function of HR, I think you’re going to end up having a better employee experience, and then ultimately, from our perspective, better IT products and services to veterans.

Tom Temin
It seems like the trend in better customer that is when the customer is the employee experience. Self Service for most functions, is the way, not only agencies want to go, but that’s what people prefer in a lot of cases. Fair to say?

Nathan Tierney
That’s totally fair to say. I also think of you know, from employees, their customers too, right? You can either buy what I’m selling or you’re going to go somewhere else. And so if we can create that seamless employee experience along your journey each step of the way and make it easier for you to navigate. Why wouldn’t you want to stay with us? Right? Because we’re solving your pain points and highlighting those things are working well.

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Tom Temin
And does the talent experience portal extend back through people that are maybe applying for a job at VA and going through that process until they get onboarded? To use the common word.

Nathan Tierney
In the future it will. At present, it doesn’t, but that’s all part of the modernization effort. I’m really happy that one of the things we did is we created a career portal specific for the Office of Information Technology. And we took those broad buckets of like it, specialist, 2210s, and we put a decoder ring to it so that you could understand and crosswalk it to the work roles of things like, hey, if you’re a software engineer in industry, here’s a career and help you navigate to there. The other thing we did that I really like is we use testimonials right from our own employees within those jobs that they’re actually doing. I mean, who better to share the story of working within OIT and the VA than the people themselves doing the job? And that has really been beneficial for us in our recruitment strategies as well, and then also, basically just sharing our story.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Nathan Tierney. He’s deputy chief information officer in Chief People Officer for the IT function at the Veterans Affairs Department. And it strikes me there’s two aspects of creating something like this talent experience portal. One is what it is you want people to experience the customer, in this case, the employee. And also, there must be an awful lot of integration of systems that were built separately over many years that have to come together so that the people accessing all of this can have a unified experience?

Nathan Tierney
That’s true, but I think, from my perspective, we’re taking a different approach at it, right? People are at the center of everything we do, right? And in any business, regardless, in the federal government, or anywhere you have to have people, I mean, they’re the ones that create things, they’re the ones that innovate, and they’re the ones that get the job done. So we’ve taken the approach of creating an employee journey map. Mapping out each of those stages, from the time we try to attract you to the time we onboard you through the development phase retention, even to where you separate and mapped out what’s working what’s not working. And now we’re designing our products like a talent experience portal around that to again, create that seamless employee experience. It’s taking more of a user designed approach to it, and I think we’re going to benefit from it, at least. That’s what the initial feedback is. Initial feedback is from our employees.

Tom Temin
Give us an example of the type of thing that someone you envision would experience, an employee, a doctor, all the way down to an orderly in somewhere that what would they encounter in this portal? What do you envision them being able to do or experiencing?

Nathan Tierney
Right now, let’s take an employee right you come in and you want to advance in your career right through training or development. Now you can come to our career development portal and align to the work roles actually see, okay, what do I need to do to progress to that next level? What are those core tasks that I need to understand to be competitive for that next role? And you can do those tasks there. You can take independent self-assessments for yourself to see where do you need to get better at? It aligns you to the training content that we either provide internally or outsource, right? And so you’re creating your whole career tracks or pathway based on that individual. The other cool feature is, let’s say you’re working in end user operations, but you kind of have this inkling about what’s this thing called AI, right? You can map over to that area and learn about those different things as well, right? So from a cross functional training there, we’re creating opportunities for that too. So we have just in time training, OJT all wrapped into one integrated portal to help the employees and their development and growth.

Tom Temin
What about some of the routine functions like scheduling vacation, or checking my balances, or checking my pay year to date, that kind of thing?

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Nathan Tierney
Yeah, that link is in the talent experience portal, which links you to our timekeeping, where you look at your benefits, etc. So you can have that information. I would offer to you, though, that just because we build it doesn’t mean they’re going to come or like it, right? So I like to ask these questions, when, when we feel the product part of agile development is, what do you like? What do you not like? What do you need? Right? And getting, we do a lot of focus groups and get feedback that shapes our product development, which, again, then allows us to focus, kind of like Pareto on those feature enhancements that we need to make.

Tom Temin
And so that gets back to the question of many, many systems supporting all of these different functions. There’s got to be something in the background that you’re knitting together in some manner so that it presents as a virtual.

Nathan Tierney
We definitely are, like I mentioned earlier. As we modernize our systems, we’re making sure that they’re interoperable with each other, and that’s just kind of what we’re doing. I mean, it the technology sometimes is agnostic. It’s more about, you know, what is the problem you’re trying to solve and what is success look like? Right? The problem I’m trying to solve for my position is that I want to delight our employees, right? I want to create a seamless employee experience that says, wow, I really love working here, right? You understand me. You understand the problems that I’m facing and the challenges, and you’re enabling me to be successful.

Tom Temin
A number of years ago, organizations had the idea of their own intranets where all of the information was available on a private IP based type of network. Is the intranet now obsolete, and you can really have bots and artificial intelligence agents call up documents and functions and so on that people need. And therefore, the internet idea is maybe, obsolete?

Nathan Tierney
I don’t know that it’s obsolete. That’s a great question. I haven’t thought of it from that way. I’ve been thinking it more from a perspective as we’ve created this, this ecosystem, right, from an HR perspective that helps support the full employee life cycle, right, as mentioned earlier, from the time we attract and recruit you to the time you retire or separate. And so one of the things we have is on our here is a human resource information system, right? That creates that centralized management for all employee data, payroll benefits, performance management, etc., and it supports full mobile access for employees and managers to update information for any device. So what does this mean? That’s this means we kind of get out of the business of emailing back and forth, right, which can sometimes create delays or doing the old paper copy stuff. And so again, it’s more about a digital transformation into a modern way of approaching the people side of the house, right?

Tom Temin
And just a final question on this whole journey toward that talent experience portal idea. How do you program it from a functional standpoint, that is, you’ve got a lot of different functions, a lot of different offerings that you want to have. How do you prioritize the individual projects? Sounds like this is a long-term effort that maybe is continuous forever.

Nathan Tierney
I kind of think of it from a four-bucket approach. I mentioned that the heroes, right? Or centralized management for like, ploy, data, payroll, etc., right? The other bucket is, you know, every business struggles with how you recruit, right, retain and train talent, so that second bucket is an applicant tracking system, right? How do we streamline our hiring process? You hear a lot about federal hiring takes too long. You. Well, you know, I think you can expedite that if you have an applicant tracking system, and improve your policies and your processes, right, and directly engage with that new applicant. I’ll give you an example. Recently, we mapped out a candidate journey map for people that want to work within the Office of Information Technology. What we found was we weren’t even really talking to people until they actually applied, you know, which means we weren’t even planting the seed up front to say, hey, here’s one of the reasons why you want to come join VA and the officer information technology. So as we adapt our systems to be able to manage that process, right, it’ll create a better interface for both our HR professionals, but also for the candidates that we’re trying to lure over to us, right and attract the third bucket is a learning management system, and that that’s as I mentioned earlier, we created our own centric career development portal aligned to the work roles for technology, and that allows us to deliver the training the development programs through a platform that makes it easier to use and navigate, versus farming you out to 10 different sites, right? It creates that career track which is so important to our employees. And the last one is creating that Employee Self Service Portal. That portal really empowers our employees, again, to manage their own personal information, their benefits, time off, etc., and get navigated to where they need to go if they need to go. If they have a question about, hey, what would my potential retirement benefits look like? How do I add another member to my life insurance, etc.?

Tom Temin
Nathan Tierney is deputy CIO and Chief People Officer at the Veterans Affairs Department’s Office of Information Technology.

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