OMB hires first governmentwide chief technology officer

The Bush administration has hired the first governmentwide chief technology officer, according to a spokeswoman with the Office of Management and Budget. Norman Lorentz, the former CTO of information technology industry job service Dice Inc., started working at OMB Jan.2, reporting to Mark Forman, associate director for information technology and e-government, the spokeswoman said. In October, OMB's E-Government Task Force chose 22 agency projects to support out of an interagency e-government fund proposed in the President's budget. The President had requested $100 million to fund e-government programs. However, he got only $5 million in the final version of the Treasury-Postal spending bill. According to the spokeswoman, Forman chose a new CTO because OMB needed someone to act as a chief architect on e-government issues. If Forman intends Lorentz to act as a traditional technology architect, Lorentz would help to define the overall structure and interrelationships of e-government projects. A technology system architecture usually involves a broad, all-encompassing assessment of how different components work together. Lorentz was also the first CTO of the Postal Service.