In outlining the Bush administration's $59.3 billion IT budget for fiscal year 2004, the president's chief IT adviser said at a briefing Tuesday that a top priority will be hiring and training IT staff to manage more than 5,000 multimillion-dollar technology projects.

"Pure and simple, we don't have enough project managers and solutions architects for the work we ask them to do," says Mark Forman, associate director for IT and E-government at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

As the OMB reviews agency and departmental budgets, Forman says, it'll also encourage agencies and departments to buy enterprise software packages that contain business best practices. The government spends about $19 on IT services for every dollar expended on enterprise software. His goal: to reduce that IT services-to-enterprise software ratio to the private sector's 6-to-1 ratio.

The administration's IT budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 would earmark $37.3 billion for IT that supports core governmental functions, with half of that going to development and modernization projects and the remainder slated for maintaining existing operations. Bush's budget would allot $20.3 million for noncore government functions such as office automation and infrastructure. The administration would allocate $1 billion for enterprise architecture.

For the current fiscal year, President Bush proposed spending $52.6 billion on IT, up from $48.6 billion in 2002 and $46.1 billion in 2001.