"Lux, James P" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well.. That's always a trade.. Buying comes out of the capital bucket, > leasing comes out of the expense bucket, and they have very different > treatments, accounting wise. Don't forget that JPL works on a "cost > reimbursement" basis: that is, we spend money, and the gov't, via > NASA, reimburses those costs, and ONLY those costs. There are > literally bookshelves full of rules (the Federal Acquisition > Regulations) that tell you what is allocable, accountable, and > reimburseable.
Translation: "bureaucracy is expensive". > the US government will not pay for interest on borrowed money. Don't tell the folks holding all of those US bonds! I'm pretty sure you meant that it will not allow its subsidiaries to borrow money separately. > Most capital investments have to be approved by an act of > congress, and the amortization of that investment requires special > treatment to make sure that costs are properly allocated to each > project. Leasing makes it easy. Accountants cost money too, if you do > march down the amortization process. Many, many commercial > companies have similar sorts of issues, particularly with respect > to transactions between divisions (e.g. see Regulation W for > banking), all designed to prevent "hiding profits". Which leads to so much overhead that we end up with the $700 hammer (for military work, which has even more of it), and at JPL, hardware prices much above what an individual would pay to purchase the same item on the open market. (Without benefit of a volume discount). There should be a happy medium between using regulations to squeeze out waste/fraud, and drowning in red tape. To me this program seems rather closer to the latter than the former. > Actually, before they went to a centralized support model, they found > that the "shadow administrator" and "shadow support staff" costs were > huge, and more to the point, not accurately measureable (what you > can't measure, you can't manage). Conversely, it may cost more to measure and manage than it saves. > And, while most JPL technical staff are certainly capable of doing > their own support, there's good reason for them not to Agreed. However, there is a simple way to enforce that, deny end users admin access to JPL supplied PCs. (Well, it might not so simple to keep the technically adept out of their machines. ) > Support isn't trivial here, even for office staff. For a variety of reasons (and not unique to JPL.. Any other 5000+ employee, $1B year business will have similar ones), we have an amazingly wide array of various and sundry institutional applications to do things like timecards, keeping track of inventory, document mangement, etc. I'd venture that the desktop support staff spends more than 70% of their time dealing with non-OS related software issues (e.g. why is my email not getting through), and a very tiny fraction of their time responding to hardware problems or OS issues. Point 1, I believe you that support isn't spending much time fixing hardware, which is why I think this contract is too expensive. Point 2, if the core software (presumably mostly web based at this juncture) is so problematic, it would suggest that that is the place to go for cost savings. > Let us not forget IT security. This is a non-trivial matter when you have to manage tens of thousands of desktops and comply with dozens of pages of government regulation, NASA procedural instructions, etc. > > The upshot is, you get a fair amount for your $130/month support subscription. To put that in context, that's less than two hours of engineer time. So $4680 for three years for purchase and support of what type of machine exactly? Does the XXX/month include the support of the centralized business software, or just the end user's machine? It was my impression that it was the latter, which is why I thought this manner of supplying computers to be overly expensive. Surely network support is covered in some sort of overhead and isn't allocated on a machine by machine basis. > For what it's worth, we have a similar sort of scenario when dealing > with test equipment. Do you own it, and have in house inventory, > (with all the peculiar government contract stuff about cost > accounting), or do you have an outside vendor provide it > on lease/rent. That's a tough one. I would assume that things like oscilloscopes and voltmeters would be owned and kept in a pool for checkout. These have a long service life and aren't all that expensive. For specialized and expensive equipment, it is too complex to generalize, even before the government purchase rules are thrown into the mix. These sorts of tools often need expensive service contracts if purchased (to cover the replacement of failed parts which are not generally available), and it often comes down to 6 of one and half dozen of the other if buy or lease is most cost effective. It's a different problem though. Most test equipment is not a commodity. Computers are. Regards, David Mathog [EMAIL PROTECTED] Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
