Forman pushes e-gov into homeland security arena

The Bush administration is working on e-gov-related homeland security initiatives that will concentrate on architecture and on beginning pilot projects that can push information integration.

The idea of information integration goes beyond sharing information to getting information systems to work together to glean intelligence from various databases, said Mark Forman, the e-gov point man at the Office of Management and Budget, said June 5 at the Federation of Government Information Processing Councils' conference in New Orleans.

Forman said he and Steve Cooper, the chief information officer of the Office of Homeland Security, are working together on identifying projects.

The architecture or foundation projects will look at the processes needed for sharing and analyzing information across agencies and between state, local and federal agencies, Forman said.

The pilot projects will focus on known gaps in systems and processes and on deploying a solution to address the gap in 60 to 120 days, he said. The pilots should be identified by the end of the fiscal year.

Forman and Cooper also are working on the information sharing strategy that will be part of the homeland security strategy to be released by Tom Ridge in early July. The goal of the information sharing strategy will be to improve response time and to improve the quality of decision-making, Forman said.

The challenge is a great one, he said. "In some cases, the cycle time for decisions has to drop down to minutes or hours, and we just aren't used to that," Forman said. "Doing architecture analysis is hard. It is not just improving processes, but defining the processes."