White House's e-gov point man details two-year plan

Mark Forman, director of technology and e-government at the White House, said Tuesday he is looking to reshape, within two years, how the federal government communicates with citizens, businesses, states and internal employees. His plan aims to save the nation up to $270 billion by reducing the amount of redundant information the government collects each year.

"We want to give a magnitude in improvement in federal government value" for the $45 billion in annual information technology investments made every year, said Forman, who works out of the White House Office of Management and Budget. He spoke Tuesday to members of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, which held a meeting on research and development recommendations for the Bush administration.

In July, the administration put Forman in charge of a new interagency task force. The group was tapped to coordinate President Bush's e-government agenda, which is tied to an overarching five-point plan for improving government services. Aspects of Bush's plan include developing budgets based on an agency's performance, outsourcing services, and retraining and hiring employees to better incorporate technology into their jobs.

Forman noted that while the federal government is the largest purchaser of IT products, it has not experienced the same level of productivity growth as the private sector. He said that is partly due to the government's structure for using information technology. For example, agencies have been acting as "islands of automation" without effectively sharing information, he said.

Government agencies also tend to buy new equipment rather than fix current systems, he said. And few agencies have created performance plans that they fulfill.

To fix some of the problems, Forman said he hopes to facilitate agency information-sharing by using peer-to-peer software and reducing paperwork. For example, when he started his job this summer, he had to complete 15 personnel forms, even though 80 percent of the information on each form was the same. He said the information was on 15 separate computer databases.

He also hopes to get the government to mimic the tech industry's best practices on using the Internet for providing e-commerce services.

Separate from Forman's comments, members of PITAC discussed the future of information technology. Most panelists agreed that in the short term that the IT sector is "sick," but they expect it to improve because many diverse R&D projects should result in new products that eventually will spark growth in the sector.

In addition, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have emphasized the importance of backing up and storing information in separate locations. Businesses are likely to speed their purchases of technology for such backup systems, and that could boost IT capital investment, which has been lagging much of this year, PITAC members said.