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Seat
Management Is Federal-Ready Seat Management is not only expanding in government but is maturing too. This was the message delivered at a conference in Washington, where experts discussed evolving projects in federal agencies and the “lessons learned” from Seat implementations. “Seat” is the outsourcing-based approach to acquiring IT services that still faces “cultural and political resistance at many levels,” said Charles Self, assistant commissioner of the General Services Administration, Federal Technology Service. “It’s still a very emotional issue.” Generally, Seat is perceived as a challenge to traditional IT procurement. Advocates believe that agencies need to get out of the business of specifying technology—a process that might begin with selecting desktop hardware and application software but will likely demand expertise in servers, databases, operating systems, network management, Help Desk, training, software distribution, security, IT asset management, and so on. Focus
on Core Business Concerns “Seat Management is really a way of shifting the accountability for the unified delivery of desktop and network services to us,” said Teresa Weipert, a Unisys vice president and general manager. Unisys provides Seat services to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). What Weipert called a “commodity service that’s more than just people and products,” Patrick Schambach, the ATF CIO, called a “full partnership with our contractor.” Among the many “lessons learned” discussed at the conference, Weipert stressed that Seat gives each side of the contracting paradigm a reason to “communicate both the good and the bad to each other, and not hide problems.” An effective Seat Management contract is in a constant state of review, Schambach said. The
TCO at Randolph AFB
Lt. Col Alvin Lee, a technology branch chief and program manager at the Air Education Training Command, riveted the conference’s attention on a TCO study he led at Randolph Air Force Base. Officials found that “soft costs” per client in a desktop environment can spiral as high as $12,000 per year—a situation that is exacerbated by inadequate and/or duplicate hardware, poor or non-existent IT support and help desk, inadequate training, weak network management, persistent security problems, and so on, Lee reported. He envisions an effort to implement Seat for 60,000 AETC users at 53 bases. Any such effort would no doubt gain insight from that of the Housing and Urban Development Department, Office of the Inspector General. This 62-location Seat implementation is beginning now with a pilot rollout in New York, said Fred Gantzler, senior vice president at DynCorp, the OIG contractor. Getting
Exec Buy-In The system also might typify Seat’s grind through cultural blocks as it has arrived in government. The HUD OIG project snagged as designers sought to plan necessary interfaces to other areas of HUD, where older contracts remain in place. Gantzler said the participation of the Inspector General and the Deputy Inspector General of HUD was essential in smoothing out such problems. “It’s
very important to have buy-in and support from the executive level
in an agency,” he said. “If you don’t have it, things
can get out of control.” In 1998, using the NASA Outsourcing Desktop Initiative (ODIN) program, the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland implemented a 9,000-seat configuration that also provides a model for how other agencies might proceed. The configuration was devised to meet specific levels of service as spelled out by NASA officials, said Mark Silverstein, the Goddard ODIN project manager. Mission-related user interests at the Center range from general use PC tasks to one of the most advanced scientific/engineering communities in government. The ODIN contractor at Goddard, Intellisource Information Systems, provides a full menu of desktop support services that leads to “a steady state of operations in a stable seat services environment,” Silverstein said. Mars Mariano, the Intellisource Goddard project manager, reported that Intellisource and NASA measure “support delivery” against service level agreements (SLAs) on a monthly basis. He gave the conference a brief glimpse of the factors that have led to monthly success rates ranging from 90 to 99 percent, and noted that areas of improvement are often identified as service is measured. Soften
Your Soft Costs While conceding that Seat might have gotten off to a rocky start, Self and others pointed out that if the Fortune 500 won’t be able to hire enough expertise to run their own IT shops then government will have no choice but to outsource its desktop support and service needs. But even if this were not the case, advocates point to TCO studies that show how soaring soft costs can only be corrected with better hardware and support. Soft costs of $10,000 and more are emerging in many agency studies, which look especially harsh alongside ATF’s recent finding of less than $5,000 with Seat in place. Soft costs are the costs agencies incur as a result of IT use. GSA, the Air Force, the Treasury Department and other agencies that have rolled up their sleeves and closely examined TCO have uncovered staggering productivity losses in current environments. Lt. Col. Hill found that the average desktop user at AETC spends 9.3 hours per month fixing his or her own IT problems and spends another 9.2 hours per month helping coworkers with their IT problems. The productivity loss is 15 percent or three days per month lost for each employee. Pitted directly against these kinds of problems, the case for Seat Management begins to make itself.
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