Seat Management —Concepts and Misconceptions
Seat encompasses the complete management of IT assets—from inventory to software distribution to enterprisewide tech refresh.

Seat Management is sometimes thought to be a variation of “leasing.” This is only true if you give the idea of leasing a very wide berth in your imagination. Seat contractors and many federal officials prefer to use the phrase “managed services.”

These services might merely begin with an agency deciding to rely on contractor-supplied IT assets. What you might have perceived as “leasing” encompasses the complete management of those assets—from inventory to software distribution to enterprisewide tech refresh.

A “lease” is of little help if you are wondering whether you will need an extra gig of storage capacity on the app server by November. (By the way, you will.) Seat Management, on the other hand, is a form of contracting for IT that is structured around the functional requirements of agencies. Thus, Seat encompasses IT strategy.

“O.K. It’s Outsourcing, Isn’t It?”
Seat Management is also sometimes referred to as “outsourcing,” which is the contracting “out” of tasks usually performed in-house. Seat is, in fact, a form of outsourcing that is much like the arrangement you make with a telephone company.

You outsource your telephone requirements in the respect that you do not build your own phone lines, rights-of-way, switches, sub-stations, etc. But you do make your own phone calls.

The idea behind Seat is that you need IT support the way you need a dial tone. You are going to USE desktop computers, software, the Internet, other nets — but the cost of operating and maintaining all that infrastructure is high. And the work is time-consuming. And it requires massive expertise in different technical disciplines. It is all so very “people-intensive.”

You can keep trying to buy, upgrade, tweak and run it all yourself. Or, you can contract with a company to manage those services.

Let’s Talk About SLAs
I can hear you asking now—”But how in the world am I going to tell this company the exact number of bits, bauds and bytes I need for operational tasks, the processor speeds I need for offloading the nightly batch runs to the LAN, the different operating environments security issues force me into, the interfaces I use to make legacy data available to citizens on the Web, versus the ones I use to keep my remote users active in the workgroups, versus the ones they use in our overseas liaison offices...?”

No. You’re not gonna. In fact, your days of counting up your “bits and bauds” shortfall and dividing by the dollars left in the IT account at the end of fiscal year are all done. Instead, you are going to look at the buisness your agency does, its mission requirements, and you are going to say to your new contractor, “I need to do this mission.”

Specifically, you are going to take all your requirements and roll them into Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which are the core currency of Seat Management. “SLAs are a measure of the expected performance for the service provider,” says a Unisys white paper.

Define Tasks, Define Services, Define SLAs
SLAs essentially replace the labor-hours form of contracting, in which contractor performance was not measurable in relationship to agency mission accomplishment.

Karl Leatham, vice president, technology office, at NCI Information Systems Inc., a GSA Seat Management contractor, explained it this way: “If an agency is thoughtful and diligent about its definition of measurable SLAs, it is easily possible to tie them directly to the agency’s mission. Indeed, this would be the normal outcome of good SLA definitions.”

The tasks you seek to support will determine the services you contract out for via Seat Management. Across your various activities, these tasks might vary in terms of the service levels required to meet them. So be it, say Seat advocates, because SLAs can be applied in accordance with particular needs and changing missions.

“The principle of the Seat Management contract is that users pay for what they need,” said Tor Opsahl of Intellisource. “Not all users require the same level of service. The flexibility of the ‘levels of service’ model allows the customer to adjust the original level of service to reflect changes in the agency’s business missions.”

Let’s Talk Tech And SLAs (And “Finger-Pointing”)
Contractors as well as those who advocate Seat solutions in GSA, NASA, the Air Force and the Treasury department all note that the more encompassing you are in shifting IT management to a contractor, the better the economy of scale will be for you.

To do your agency’s business you might need: tech refreshment; OS support; application software; mainframe access tools; distributed apps; COTS and custom databases; email and web access; intranet and VPN access; video conferencing, remote learning, and image management; and access to classified or secured data.

Hardware-wise, in addition to newer stuff, you might need installation and configuration support; moves, adds and changes management; network integration and configuration; full maintenance; Help Desk, Help Desk and Help Desk support.

(We haven’t even mentioned training yet, but don’t get us started on that one.)
The SLAs you work out with a Seat contractor will not amount to a glorified accounting of your theoretical IT processing capability as reflected in all of the above services operating at 95 percent efficiency. Rather, it will measure those services in accordance with your ability to perform agency business. Just as your functional requirements are drawn from core business needs, so too are new SLA-based metrics rooted in business function, not IT form.

In fact, Seat advocates believe SLAs will ultimately alter the nature of the agency-contractor relationship. “Properly constructed, the SLA is not subject to interpretation,” said Fred Gantzler of DynCorp. “It is clear both to the agency and to the vendor when the standard has been met and when it has not. This helps to eliminate finger-pointing.”

Why It Works When It Works
Even contractors admit Seat is not for everyone. Conversely, many CIOs who have given Seat a try now swear by it. So, when it works, why does it work?
One reason might be that Seat puts an agency’s ability to do business and a contractor’s baseline incentive on a parallel course. A Seat contractor does not just plug in a Pentium III and walk off having fulfilled the deal. Seat and SLAs bring you new ways to really measure contractor performance and system support for the business mission.

In essence, performance of a Seat contract is only measured when the day’s work is done. The AGENCY’S work. Simply, did the IT infrastructure effectively support the work that needed to be done? Or, was the government PC user able to stay focused on the core mission and not get snagged by one techno crisis after another?

In fact, SLAs can be seen to represent a marked departure from what was “a constant debate on immeasurable or inconsequential performance metrics,” said Teresa Weipert, a vice president at Unisys Corporation’s Global Network Services division.

“With managed services in place, the emphasis is on meaningful metrics,” she said. “Vendors want to perform well in relation to their contracted levels of service for expansion of their business, and their agency customer is the ultimate beneficiary.”

Your Seat contractor might bring resources from 100 different vendors into play, but you don’t have to keep a long rolodex of names updated to pursue potential problems. It is your Seat contractor who is ultimately responsible for making sure that your IT capability accords to your SLAs—which, of course, encapsulate the requirements that underpin your agency’s core mission.

Maybe it’s going out on a limb to say so, or maybe not, but it’s possible that Seat contractors take more responsibility for IT than anyone ever has before. And that largely explains why it works when it does.