The Obama Administration has ordered US federal agencies to hold off on purchasing new PCs in hopes of patching up a broken ordering system.
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has put a hold on new desktops and notebooks while it sorts through what it says are "thousands" of new system orders every year.
OMB said that because agencies lack a standardized way to order, maintain, and replace their IT infrastructure, officials are forced to seek out their own contracts and purchase orders to get new PCs, leading to huge accumulated costs in waste.
"There is no need for thousands of contracts to purchase common laptops and desktops," the OMB said in its order late last week.
What answer do you predict the US government will reach, "Surfaces for everyone!"?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 21 2015, @01:18PM
I see nothing but overhead in this. Someone must be taking a cut...
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by tibman on Wednesday October 21 2015, @01:50PM
I agree. Most centralizing projects i've seen are merely land grabs and empire building. On paper they look more efficient money-wise but they never are. Now people have to work through the new red-tape to get things that use to be simple to get. Yes, it directly costs the organization less but how much is your people's time worth? Taking a week to do what use to take a day or two is actually costing the organization hundreds per instance. That is a net loss, not a gain.
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(Score: 2) by scruffybeard on Wednesday October 21 2015, @03:54PM
Not to mention that there may be some offices that have a need for a different configuration. I have seen instances where there were 10 different configs, boiled down to 2, neither of which meet anybody's needs. It looks great on paper because they saved 5% on the cost of the hardware, but then people are screaming because they don't have enough disk, or RAM to do their job.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @03:59PM
That comes out of a different pot. "We saved $X million on computer purchasing!" "But now you spend $2X million buying them because of the extra overhead in the new process." "Yes, but I saved $X million on computers."
I work for the US federal government, and I love what I do, but I've come to the conclusion that the government has no understanding of the concept of overhead. For example, we recently implemented a new time-and-tracking system. I told my boss, "So, let's say you expect it'll only take an extra hour a week for everyone to do it. Doesn't seem like much, right? But that means, for every 40 people you now need to hire ONE MORE PERSON." (Actually, it's a bit more than that, but it makes the example easy to understand.) Do you think we got that extra person? Do you think our schedules were all adjusted out a bit to compensate? And they wonder why people are frustrated, upset, and morale is low.
I've considered making a list of the overhead tasks my employees do. I bet each one loses several weeks of productivity every year to overhead. Some of that overhead is necessary - time sheets, everyone wants to get paid. Certain training. But do we really need to learn (repeatedly) about how the No Fear act affects HR, considering we don't work in HR? Nope.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 21 2015, @02:56PM
You are missing the opportunity to standardize the "security" aka snooping software.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 21 2015, @05:54PM
Centralising things that can be done locally is rarely a win unless there's an economy of scale that can be exploited
I'm sure there are absolutely no economies of scale that could be leveraged by one of the largest organizations on the planet.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 21 2015, @07:04PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves