Both have outsourced the desktops, servers, software, networks and help desks at their Washington headquarters. Smaller entities, such as the Housing and Urban Development Department's Office of the Inspector General and the Peace Corps, recently have outsourced nearly 1,500 seats combined. The 1996 Clinger-Cohen IT management reform act required technology managers to look at how they made IT investments. Since then, managers have found that IT spending doesn't stop once equipment, services or software are paid for. Direct maintenance and help desk costs, for example, continue for the life of machines and software.
Indirect costs are harder to quantify.
They occur, for instance, when a worker asks anyone other than a help desk staffer to help fix his or her computer. This lost productivity is very hard to capture under most IT cost measurement schemes. Agencies attempt to quantify TCO in order to help them decide whether to move to seat management. TCO studies distill the costs of myriad IT services and assets down to one price for keeping a single seat running per year. TCO studies also help managers determine acceptable service levels for seat management contracts.