Michael Parrish
Chief Acquisition Officer; Principal Executive Director for the Office of Acquisition, Logistics, and Construction; Department of Veterans Affairs
Michael Parrish’s major accomplishment was leading the development of VA Pathfinder, a new digital tool that enables anyone to do business or innovate with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Launched in June 2022, Pathfinder helps interested businesses of all sizes understand the landscape and processes of identifying opportunities. It walks them through the process with a real interaction, making it a crucial tool for business transformation efforts, particularly in market research and acquisition of new products and services. Pathfinder strengthens decision-making in VA acquisitions, which improves the quality of veteran health care.
As new technologies are integrated into VA services, it’s important they’re easy to use and intelligent, or what Parrish calls the “EII Doctrine.”
“This means that all new technologies embraced by the VA must be created according to human-centered design principles; integrated across the entire agency, not siloed; and come with the capability for intelligent data processing and predictive analytics,” he said. “This is the context in which we developed the Pathfinder initiative, which has already attracted dozens of new innovators seeking to collaborate with VA on improving the lives of our veterans.”
Why Watch
Parrish and his team are heavily focused on major acquisition reform in 2023. They aim to modernize the organization and provide critical oversight of acquisition processes. Proper governance is key to achieving cradle-to-grave lifecycle management of cost, schedule and performance, which will streamline how industry does business with VA and enable faster innovation and acquisition.
They are focusing on qualitative user adoption of new technologies to improve internal processes and providing quantitative best-in-class commercial standard technology tools. These tools enable VA teammates to achieve their mission of increasing access and improving outcomes for veterans.
“I am a champion of modernizing the VA’s analog bureaucracy in the digital age,” Parrish said.