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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: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday October 21 2015, @02:03PM
officials are forced to seek out their own contracts and purchase orders to get new
Some of them probably get hardware for free from (insert bogeyman of the week). Just kidding (probably?) this is agency level not individual box orders. Although it does make you wonder.
There is at least some minimal gain in theory if the NSA approves a bulk purchase, assuming they do their job better than J Random Bureaucrat does at doing the NSAs job.
I suspect there is also intense butthurt that ten department heads are having meetings at football stadiums to discuss ten little orders, when everyone knows the head honcho is supposed to be getting season tickets for one really big order.
Note that they're talking agency level not small office team level. So the FBI and the CIA should have the same Chinese-made desktop PCs, or whatever. This MIGHT imply we're about to see the rise of a new bureaucracy, a "department of I.T." that owns all hardware and all helpdesks and all cybersecurity teams and so on.