Norman Lorentz’s business card reads “Executive Office of the President.” As Bush’s chief technologist — the first CTO of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — he is charged with fulfilling the White House’s technical mission — rearchitecting the federal governments’ massive siloed systems under the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA). It’s no small feat applying a private-sector approach to the fed government. Lorentz leads a cross-agency task to re-engineer the “business processes that serve the citizens,” he says, and define and apply standard performance metrics and a data reference model. In doing so, Lorentz is analyzing closely the fed’s $56.2 billion IT budget, to identify business process gaps and redundancies and to see how federal agencies invest their IT dollars. The FEA is now integrated into the annual federal government budget process. “Moving forward with these efforts will directly impact the velocity of the economic recovery for our country, by creating an environment where the private sector is fully engaged in providing the necessary solutions to these imperatives,” Lorentz says. — L.W.P. Return to InfoWorld’s 25 Most Influential CTOs 2002 Software Development