b'This article is adapted from, Improving the Delivery of Services and Care for Veterans: A Case Study of Enterprise Government by Matthew Hidek, Nathaniel Birnbaum, Nicholas Armstrong, Management Zachary S. Huitink (Washington, D.C., IBM Center for The Business of Government, 2019)Improving the Delivery of Services and Care for Veterans: A Case Study of Enterprise GovernmentBy Matthew Hidek, Nathaniel Birnbaum, Nicholas Armstrong, Zachary S. Huitinkand governance system that aims to achieve goals spanning organizational boundaries.In Improving the Delivery of Services and Care for Veterans, we present a roadmap for developing an enterprise approach to federal veterans services and careone that aligns interagency planning and service delivery to support veterans holistically, and does so in a way that promotes robust engagement with communities. Specifically, the report presents five building blocks for moving toward an enterprise approach, and an accompanying set of recommendations and key action steps to put these building blocks in place.The Enterprise ApproachMechanisms like governmentwide planning, organization-spanning goals, and accompanying implementation initiativesfrom working groups to task forcesreflect the reality that while individual agencies of government pursue The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) operates thespecific missions, much of what they aim to do spans nations largest integrated health care system and manages aspheres of responsibility. Accordingly, to get things done, wide range of federal benefits and services for veterans, theiragencies must often work together. Across policy areas and dependents, and survivors. At the same time, federal servicesoperational functions, such teaming goes by a number of and care for Americas military veterans span across multipledifferent names, but is increasingly organized and classified agencies beyond the VA to include the Departments ofunder the concept of enterprise government.Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Labor, and the Small Business Administration, among others. Yet, whileThis report uses the term enterprise specifically in reference the VA leads an internal strategic planning process aimedto situations involving multiple organizational actors at linking national and local action, to date, no mechanism(here, multiple agencies of government), and defines the exists to establish priorities, resources, and responsibilitiesenterprise approach as a system of coordinated planning across the federal government and align federal efforts withand governance to pursue goals that span organizational those of the broader public (state and local), private, andboundaries. This definition stems from and distills recent nonprofit sectors working to serve the veteran community. research and practice-oriented analysis of numerous cases involving federal agencies teaming up to address shared As with other challenges characterized by such widelymanagement challenges and to tackle policy issues cutting shared responsibilitynational security, for example across areas of responsibility (for example, see Fountain, in the case of veterans affairs we would expect the2016). In these respects, the definition accounts for two federal government to use a comprehensive approach thatdistinct types of arrangements:coordinates the efforts of each agency to achieve common purposes. This model, increasingly referred to as enterprise government, involves a coordinated cross-agency planning WINTER 2019 / 2020 IBM Center for The Business of Government 101'