Steve Cooper, in shirt sleeves and red suspenders, walks among the converted in a St. Louis ballroom where dozens of state CIOs have gathered for an annual conference. Cooper's calling as CIO of the White House Office of Homeland Security is to create IT systems that let agencies at all levels of government share information deemed critical to protecting the country. His gospel: Information technology by itself won't prevent terrorism, but it can give the good guys a better shot at doing so.

The Office of Homeland Security wants to build innovation and not be so rigid as to stifle creativity. Intelligence isn't an exact science, CIO Cooper says.

The sermon this day is on "enterprise architecture," a concept that has taken on increasing importance in the last year for IT staffs in every department and agency in the U.S. government, though none more urgently than Homeland Security. Cooper talks about how federal and state agencies need to pinpoint processes they all use -- whether they're handing out grants or booking criminal suspects -- to better understand the IT systems that could make them more efficient and collaborative. Cooper is clearly a true believer in the notion that architecture is going to help determine the success of homeland defense. "Enterprise architecture doesn't self-regurgitate answers. ... People still need to make decisions," he says. "The benefits architecture provides allow us to clearly understand the process and make informed, educated decisions on how we will interact."

Creating a single federal architecture -- basically, a blueprint that defines common business practices and technologies to make government work more efficiently -- is among the top management goals of the Bush administration. "We have dysfunctional information technology," says Mark Forman, who as associate director for IT and E-government at the Office of Management and Budget is the administration's top IT official. "We don't communicate well in the E-world. We have to change."

That's starting to happen. In the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, the government plans to spend $1.7 million on creating a federal architecture, and additional investment will come from individual agencies, says Norman Lorentz, the OMB's chief technology officer. He predicts that amount will climb dramatically for the next fiscal year.

As a government discipline, architecture planning has surfaced occasionally over the years. The Defense Department began mapping an architecture for its intelligence-communications network in 1995, when it realized that it operated more than 300 incompatible intelligence-communications systems. "We didn't know how to compare any two of them," says Truman Parmale, a Defense Department program manager and systems analyst. "They had no common foundation." Developing an architecture let defense planners identify interfaces that could be used to move information among systems.

But an orchestrated initiative to develop a single federal architecture began after George W. Bush took office. In the spring of 2001, Forman joined the OMB with the task of using IT to simplify the delivery of government services. That led to 24 E-government initiatives, interagency programs unveiled in February to deliver government services electronically. In developing the initiatives, planners realized that information about the underlying architecture of the federal government was scattered or nonexistent. The same month, the budget office established the Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office (www.feapmo.gov), guided by Lorentz, and in July, the government started publishing the first of several models that set goals and guidelines for departments to create architectures.