Terms and conditions often are not spelled out on Web sales sites, he says, and important details about factors such as technical compatibility with other systems may be missing. With so many choices and difficult comparisons confronting PC buyers, there s a new movement to eliminate much of the buying conundrum. Called seat management, it is expected to become widely available to federal agencies through GSA and NASA this summer. With seat management, agencies contract for provision of computing services. As with old-fashioned telephone services, the seat management contractor supplies the equipment, the software and the means to link them through networks, as well as maintenance and user assistance.
Agencies pay for services to each desktop for a year.
In federal IT circles, opinions are mixed about whether seat management will take off. The high cost of operating and maintaining one PC in an office setting for a year has been much publicized, but when it s a single line item in their budgets, agency executives may resist paying the piper, preferring to keep the costs muddy. Some doubting Thomases view seat management as a trendy label for leasing, which may be taking off slowly after years of talk. Leasing PCs has worked well for agencies such as the Census Bureau, but there is little sign of high-volume leasing ahead. On the other hand, it seems to some agency managers that they have every one of those 10,000 PC configurations under their own roofs.