The goal isn't necessarily to create one single computing platform, which would be a colossal undertaking in a government that spends about $52 billion on IT. Instead, the intent is to map what processes technology supports and the systems and software that are used in order to do them better. Some of it will result in basic cost-cutting. The government manages 18 payroll systems, each serving at least 100,000 workers; through architecture analysis, that number should be cut to two sometime next year, Lorentz says.

But the highest stakes relate to making the country safer. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks brought the importance of governmentwide architecture planning to policy makers' attention. It revealed how federal and local governments had thousands of incompatible IT systems, not only to capture and share intelligence about terrorists but to aid the police officers, firefighters, and rescue crews who responded to the attacks. "Homeland security makes the need for a federalwide enterprise architecture most acute," says Air Force CIO John Gilligan, co-chair of the CIO Council's federal architecture and infrastructure committee. "The complexity of homeland security is overwhelming, so its architecture becomes the key tool to document the interrelationships, responsibilities, and information flows to get a handle on the systems to perform its enormously complicated role."

The Department of Homeland Security will pull from parts of 22 agencies, so their architectures need to be mapped out to link their services and systems. The six core agencies to comprise the new department have identified their architectures, but an enormous task lies ahead. "We need to take those existing architectures and integrate them," Cooper says. Some agencies have already made progress. The Department of Justice in recent years created a system that, while still far from a model of collaborative technology, better coordinates agencies within the department that process criminal suspects (see story, p. 50).

One of the most complicated processes the Homeland Security Department faces is how intelligence information is collected and disseminated. Here, the government's primary goal won't be to consolidate systems and cut costs. Requiring all spy agencies to use the same processes and technologies might even be dangerous, forcing agencies to change effective tactics to fit a one-size system. "We want to build innovation and not be so rigid as to stifle creativity," Cooper says. "We don't want to have exactly the same processes used by every agency. Intelligence isn't an exact science." Having a well-mapped architecture would let agencies know where it's possible to make links so intelligence systems can communicate with one another to improve collaboration. But there are limits on how easy collaboration can be. Intelligence agencies face legal restrictions on what kinds of information can be shared, measures put in place to protect citizens. So the office is looking into developing a system in which someone, say from the CIA or FBI, seeking information would submit queries, and the information would be released after the answers receive clearance. In many situations, then, agencies wouldn't have direct access to each other's data.

The biggest obstacles to this kind of collaboration tend to be cultural. Bureaucrats and politicians get protective of their turf. Yet the Air Force's Gilligan contends that architecture planning might help break down some of those barriers. "Architecture allows us to strip away emotions influenced by culture and get to strict, fact-based discussions that help people understand what the objectives are," he says.

Budgets are another factor that will encourage government IT managers to give architecture its due. Each agency is responsible for mapping its own architecture, though the OMB and the federal CIO Council set the direction. The OMB has a lot of power to direct spending for IT projects, and agencies that can't show a well-thought-out architecture will see the money spigot turned off. "I will be like a junkyard dog," says Forman, who spent much of the '90s navigating another sprawling technology bureaucracy -- IBM.