Analysis & Commentary:

BUSH'S TOP IT OFFICIAL TALKS ABOUT TAXES

As reported by Rick Saia, imagine April 15 becoming an insignificant date on the calendar.

Anyone who pays federal income taxes -- and spends hours filling out forms and hunting for financial records just to meet that tax deadline -- probably wouldn't mind avoiding that deadline each year.

Norman Lorentz wouldn't mind, either.

Lorentz is chief technology officer for the Executive Office of the President, and a big part of his work is overseeing a major effort to coordinate the government's now largely disparate online efforts to make them more user-friendly. The Bush administration's $2.1 trillion budget plan for the government's next fiscal year calls for the elimination of what it calls "islands of automation."

The administration plans to spend $722 million on the program in federal fiscal year 2003, which begins October 1. But it sees a much bigger payback in an estimated $1 billion in savings, along with what it hopes will be improved interaction and responsiveness between the government and citizens.

"Basically, the way we're going to eliminate the islands is to take the cross-functional approach," Lorentz said in an interview March 5 with Computerworld, just before he took part in a panel discussion at the publication's Premier 100 conference in Palm Desert, California.

Lorentz is now working with a committee in the White House made up of representatives from 27 federal agencies.

One familiar government function is the annual reconciliation of what people owe or will get refunded to them in federal income taxes. Lorentz pointed to an expansion of the Internal Revenue Service's EZ Tax program as an example of what could be done.

"It should be as easy as humanly possible" for a taxpayer to use the system, Lorentz said. Rather than having taxpayers scurry every year to find receipts and fill out 1040 and Schedule A forms, he added, the government should be able to do all the math for the taxpayers and then send them bills. After all, he noted, it was the government that wanted the income tax in the first place.

EZ Tax, Lorentz said, will be the first step in making Washington's e-government efforts easier to use.

"We use two basic tenets: Unify and simplify," he said.

The ultimate goal? "We'll create one [government face to the public] and turn the lights off on many," focusing on what citizens want and eliminating redundancies, said Lorentz.

Lorentz began his job just two months ago. He's also responsible for working with the office of Richard Clarke, the administration's cybersecurity chief, to help bolster federal IT security and technology-related efforts of the new Office of Homeland Security.

Lorentz's 30-year IT career includes two years as senior vice president and CTO at the U.S. Postal Service, where he oversaw a $4 billion budget and managed 4,000 IT professionals nationwide.

His chief role now in the electronic-government effort is spearheading the technical side. That includes developing a common information architecture and a core set of standardized technology models. "We are literally going to create once and use many times," Lorentz said.

But the administration must first re-engineer processes to accommodate the plan before the technical part begins to take shape, he said.

As he later told attendees at the Computerworld panel discussion on technology migration strategies: "It starts with business alignment, and then technology enables the outcome."