Ratio of IT Department Workers To Overall Employees?

An anonymous reader writes "I was recently talking to a friend about the Fortune 100 company she works for in IT. She told me the company has 35,000 employees, including over 5,000 IT employees — and it's not a web firm. It has numerous consultants doing IT work as well. To me, from a background where my last job had 50 IT employees and 1,000 total, a 1-in-7 ratio of IT employees seems extremely high. Yet she mentioned even simple changes to systems/software take over six months. So, what ratio does your company have, and what is reasonable? How much does this differ by industry?" I'd be interested to see how much it differs by OS platform as well.

Comments

That's a lot o' IT

[Anonymous Coward]

5,000 IT (+ IT consultants) for a non tech/web firm seems a little out-of-whack.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[timmarhy]

maybe, but what if it's a bank which lives and dies by it's it systems?

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[dosius]

Seriously. I can't see a company of that size needing more than maybe 25 total IT workers, and that's being generous.

-uso.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[StrategicIrony]

Having worked in about 20 different environments I can share some numbers.

Again, this is a silly thing to base your staffing on, but since it's being asked, I'll answer... These are average companies... web presence, critical systems, but not entirely "IT centric" business.

Ratios are IT:users.

Help desk staff (answering phones) 1:1000-1:4000
Desktop Support (fixing windows) 1:100-1:800
Network Support (routing, switching, etc) 1:400-1:1000
Telecom Support (fixing phones, VOIP, etc) 1:1000-1:5000
Programmers (this is very rough) 1:100-1:1000

Server Admins (staff-to-servers) 1:50-1:250

There ya go.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[walt-sjc]

Then you need glasses. Seriously. Larger companies tend to have Many Many specialized systems, some of which require full time dedicated staff, or TEAMS. They probably have a mainframe (or 20 of them) too.

Keep in mind that a fortune 100 company is likely to have facilities all over the country / world, some facilities probably staffed 24/7.

While 1/7 seems quite high, 25/15000 would be just insane.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[big tex]

That's near the ratio our company has.
We're a construction company, bridges, highways, tunnels, that stuff.
about 6,000 staff (engineers, superintendents, support services) and 16,000 craft (men with hammers).
There's about 15 regional IT guys, and about 15 in the home office, since everything is run centrally.
That's 1:300 on the engineering and support services, but 1:730 on the whole.
25:15000 (1:600) doesn't seem bad on the whole.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[jmkaza]

Having worked at a couple banks, I'd say that the type of business doesn't really have much to do with it. The banks I were at had an IT to total staff ratio of about 1:30-50. There were a limited number of systems, and we knew all knew them inside out. At those banks, the total number of employees were in the low hundreds, so a handful of us could cover the issues well. I'm with a much larger organization now, and the ratio has fallen to about 1:20. With the increased size of the org, the variance in and complexity of systems is greatly increased, so higher levels of staffing are necessary. A lot of enterprise IT isn't cost effective until it's providing services for 1000+ people, so in small orgs, it doesn't exist. Manual processes are sufficient. I'd say as a general rule, the larger the org, the tighter the ratio.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[jvin248]

Sometimes companies find that if they *gasp* remove half the workforce they move at four-times the speed!

That's what turnaround companies do - and can be successful.

Such as: Often one or two key people can design up a robust process to get things done in a few days..while a team of ten will take months to define that same project.

Or: How many emails get logged between a group of 3 people vs a department of 300? Is the customer experience suddenly better?

As organizations get larger, there are "naturally" more "approval levels" and "communication" and "revisions" and "new requests" and so on. The beast feeds itself, and that is before politics get started and expand the workload yet more.

That's why Entrepreneurs and Small Companies actually get started and have a chance to thrive and allow turnaround companies to exist.


Discretionary Thoughts

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[coryking]

For your industry, sure. Most of your staff aren't on a computer the whole workday.

25:15000 for, say, an insurance company where everybody is at a desk with a computer on it would be insane.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense - not everyone lives or works in or near a Fortune 100 HQ - but you really need to get out more.

20 IT people to manage every system that 20k+ people, plus servers/clusters, plus datacenter, plus integration in to every factory, manufacturing facility, office...

Yeah, 20 people can do that. If they're borg with molecular assembly tech, direct neural interfaces, and can control 10-100 cyborg drone IT staff and all of their tech/system goodies all at the same time.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[shokk]

In our company, a pharma, it's 1:10. It's not all about how many users you have. On the back end it's how many systems you have properly centralized and configured to run smoothly, and by how much these systems are growing. We also have people separated into duties so there is less gear shifting from problems that span different expertise instead of cross training every single person. We have people that handle documentation procedures, some that handle Windows, some for UNIX, people for helpdesk and desktop support, Lotus Notes mail admins, Notes programmers, Oracle DBAs, etc. And there is redundancy so that if some are out on vacation or sick, someone can cover them.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[bigman2003]

Not a bad stab at real world staffing ratios.

I work in a 2,000 person unit of a larger organization (like a freaking enormous University System) but we handle all of our own tech support, servers, networks, etc.

We have:
3 server admins
3 network admins
3 programmers
2 desktop support/help desk staff

That's it. We're pretty thin, but this makes us fairly recession-proof, which right now in California is a VERY good thing.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[StrategicIrony]

you do realize that colleges (mostly community, but also universities) work opposite recession cycles often.

unemployed professionals often go back to school when they cant find work. the numbers this year at schools i work with are already way up. :-)

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[mnmn]

Indeed it depends, enormously.

I was the only IT guy at two manufacturing plants, 100 people at one and 250 at the other. Half of them were on the factory floor and used common barcode computers (lock them up and not maintain them until there are hardware issues). Then there were the office desktops and printers to manage, and a few servers, again little maintenance there.

Other companies I heard about had better ratios due to the marketing department needing a better web presence and the company needing dedicated report writers and customized application developers. These were manufacturing companies too.

Now I work at VMware. Go figure.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[davolfman]

Yes, but universities pay like crap anyway so it doesn't matter. Am I wrong?

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[bigman2003]

I'm not sure where you are...but in California right now the entire State government is in a major financial crisis. We still don't have a budget passed this year (supposed to be passed by July 1) and the main reason for it is that our state budget is in the crapper.

So this year we either need to raise taxes, which is not popular with the Republicans- even though Arnie is for it...or we need to cut services, which is not popular with the democrats.

On top of that, add the many different audits of the University of California Office of the President (due to 'compensation issues' with high level administrators), and we have some fairly severe problems.

Lastly, where I work has absolutely nothing to do with students at all- so enrollment could triple, and it wouldn't matter to us.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[linear a]

One way to help normalize the ratio is by subtracting out the IT people who are in the business half. E.g., those directly adding customer value. In particular, informatics types performing research for the business should not be called part of IT (even if the company puts them into that category), but should still be called part of the denominator (business people). Also, consider, as implied or even stated elsewhere here, to normalize to the type and perhaps size of the business.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[walt-sjc]

Obviously in a company that is mostly blue collar, you are not going to have the IT needs of a white collar dominated company. Considering you are in construction, your IT needs are probably VERY modest, with desktop support being the largest portion, with email, file servers, and accounting flushing out the total. Doubtful you have CRM or ERP.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[511pf]

So, your ratio of desktop support techs to users is 1:1,000 and you have THREE people doing servers? How many servers could you possibly have? I mean, even if you have 300 servers (one for every seven users), your server guys are only supporting 100 servers while your desktop guys support 1,000 desktops. This seems completely out of whack to me.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[bigman2003]

We rely on users being able to support themselves a lot.

But we don't rely on them to manage the servers.

Once a computer is set up, users don't really need too much help. We try to have a person in each office who at least can do things like powercycle a router, but that's it. They aren't technical people, just people who can tell us if 'the little blue light is on'.

We just don't have the resources to have a lot of support people.

But as far as server support- only the City of San Francisco would be stupid enough to only have ONE person to manage their servers or network.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[NateTech]

Gee that narrowed it right down.

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[NateTech]

How about shutting down some worthless programs?

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[Lodragandraoidh]

Mainframe systems running antiquated Cobol applications, connected to OS/2 Warp on the desktop rarely needs maintenance that a good hammer and some elbow grease can't fix...

no set ratio

[timmarhy]

it varies according the what the business needs. there is no set ratio thats "good" so please any manager reading this don't make it your next brain fart.

Re:no set ratio

[shaitand]

how is this flamebait, its accurate.

Re:no set ratio

[NoobixCube]

A very good point. I work in an internet cafe, and everyone - even the manager - is IT staff. If anyone there weren't IT staff, our efficiency would go out the window. I'm just pleased that my first job in IT didn't land me with a Pointy Haired Boss.

Re:no set ratio

[Perf]

So true.

At my first company, over half the employees worked in production. A later company, about 10% were production workers.

The difference?

The first company produced high quantities of inexpensive consumables.

The second company made low quantities of custom control panels. Low quantity, high price. Another major source of income was in servicing the controls.

In some companies, the computers and users are directly related to generating income. e.g. Telemarketing or bookkeeping firm. In others, the computers are more of an overhead expense. e.g. meat packing plant.

I think a more stable number is ratio of computers to IT staff.

Re:no set ratio

[Ed Avis]

Don't you have anyone in charge of making the coffee?

Re:no set ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

I am more interested in the ratio of hotties to beasts in marketing.

Re:no set ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

Another major source of income was in servicing the controls.

Out of curiosity: were the service engineers included in your 10% figure of "production workers"? I can't wrap my head around the inefficiency of a company in which only 10% of the salaried personnel is responsible for generating all revenue.

Re:no set ratio

[hdparm]

They do, java developer.

Re:no set ratio

[Mutant321]

how is this flamebait, its accurate.

If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....

I guess his sig proved right (seeing as he's now +5 Insightful :)

Re:no set ratio

[DKlineburg]

I think a more stable number is ratio of computers to IT staff.

I think this is a very reasonable statement. I work security for a medium sized company (~700 employees). There appears to be a large IT staff, but it should be noted that for every employee there is at least 1 computer. 95% receive a company issued laptop, probably 75% company issued blackberry. The blackberries talk to the exchange server, and the laptops all have a VPN or VRF. I think there are 4 major departments and a 5th for administration. Each of those has its own database of separate. That isn't even going into the computers running with the security equipment. Those all run on their own playground, and have a separate staff to keep up and running. If you add all that up, the large IT staff comes directly in relation to the quantity of computers and devices.

As someone above posted, the size can also relate to the company of the staff itself. When it comes to pockets of the IT staff here, they are very productive and have relatively few problems. Those IT departments are also the smallest. The larger the department, the worse the problems seem to get.

Overall I would say that both factors come into play for why IT is large or small.

Re:no set ratio

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Are you crazy?

I know it's a joke on the Java logo, but really, I wouldn't rely on a Java developer for anything critical.

And we know that the most critical task in any IT department is coffee.

Re:no set ratio

[Registered Coward v2]

Another major source of income was in servicing the controls.

Out of curiosity: were the service engineers included in your 10% figure of "production workers"? I can't wrap my head around the inefficiency of a company in which only 10% of the salaried personnel is responsible for generating all revenue.

I would guess the OP was referring to those actually constructing the devices.

One of the problems with percentages is you don't know the size of the pie - 10% of 1000 is a very different structure than 10% of 50. A small shop, with a lot of R&D and service staff; as well as a sales staff might only have 5% of its staff actually making the device. Highly skilled workers, technology, and high margins means you can pay well and support the sales infrastructure you need.

Re:no set ratio

[Delkster]

I'd guess making customized systems involves a lot of design work etc. as well, and I'm not sure if GP included all those people in the 10% figure of production workers.

In fact, the way I understood the post was that the low figure of people involved in physically making the devices was exactly because of the low volume whereas the individual customizations and other design works requires a lot of people who aren't physically making the devices but would still be essential for the business.

I guess it boils down to what you consider a production job.

Re:no set ratio

[the_B0fh]

You already have so many beasts in IT, why would you hire any in Marketing? Hotties all the way man!

A vendor was visiting (been onsite multiple times), and wanted to thank one of the business directors. So I took him over to another building on the non-IT side of the campus.

We went, the director wasn't in, and we left. On the way out of the building, he said "Is it my imagination..." and I cut him off with "nope, it isn't"

Then I explained to him that marketing lived in that building, and that previously, he was slumming in the IT side.

Fortune 100 company, 100+k employees, etc

Re:no set ratio

[roguetrick]

1:2

Re:no set ratio

[banished]

This brain fart became standard procedure for one of the DoD services 2 years ago. This service implemented a plan to reduce IT personnel as a means to fund replacement of aging equipment. The result? My need for IT people has increased.

While the plan had merit at the strategic level, implementation has been poorly executed, driving up costs and manpower requirements. Mandated group policy and firewall requirements are killing my road warriors and academic researchers. Hell, even my server operators are blocked from downloading mandatory patches.

Though my current 7% ratio of IT to non-IT employees may seem high, I have strategic-level brainiacs (usually PhD types) that can't turn on a computer without assistance. I couldn't do their job, either. The brain fart plan will decrease my ratio to 4% in the next 6 months, but we will still be expectd to provide a 10-minute response to customer cries for help. Many readers here can relate, I'm sure.

Re:no set ratio

[DarkOx]

the most critical task in any IT department is coffee

No, its not the sixties anymore. Its possible to run an IT staff for several hours durring a coffee supply disruption. It has been for at least two decades pull your head up and look around once in a while. Modern products like Mountain Dew and Jolt Cola, can be uesed as a temporary coffee substitue in most IT staff units. Some units with very strong stomacs and high metabolic rates can operate on them exclusively.

Re:no set ratio

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Jolt Cola? Get the real thing.

Sniff.

I'm no Star Wars fun, but I love my r2d2

Re:no set ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

As a fellow internet cafe employee id like to offer the other side of this.

for an internet cafe with ~100 computers i am the only IT Staff. with a manager who is technically competent and 8 more minimum wage earning staff affectionately known as Desk monkeys who have enough knowledge to help the customers who cant log into their email or find a video on youtube.

For us this system works well, i would have thought having to pay more skilled IT staff to do the basic job of dealing with customers would be inefficient.

Re:no set ratio

[leenks]

It's more than a joke on the Java logo:
Java, among other things, is a type of coffee.
The first 2 bytes of a Java class are CA FE

But yes, the most critical thing in any IT department is coffee - despite other posters suggesting other caffeine drinks, coffee reins supreme.

Re:no set ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

"A very good point. I work in an internet cafe, and everyone - even the manager - is IT staff. If anyone there weren't IT staff, our efficiency would go out the window. I'm just pleased that my first job in IT didn't land me with a Pointy Haired Boss." - by NoobixCube (1133473) on Saturday August 23, @03:10AM (#24716503)

AMEN TO THAT, & you've hit the problem in this field/art & science, RIGHT ON THE HEAD (out with the "MBA only 'fratboys', & promote mgt. from within the ranks ONLY)...

* Kudos!

APK

P.S.=> Speaking as someone who's professionally been "in the trenches" for 16++ yrs. in this field? You saw it, the MAIN PROBLEM in this field, quite clearly... my guess is, you have a well run machine there, because EVERYONE THERE, including mgt., IS a tech thru & thru...

AND, not just some "performance metric maker" or b.s. artist that is the lapdog to upper mgt. (as so many are) that get the "deer in the headlights look" when you start talking what this business is, REALLY about (tech itself)...

Sure, money enters the picture, but, you GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR TOO (& these clueless PHB's you speak of? There is entirely too many of them, that are solely dependent on this b.s. mantra of "I don't need to know how it's done, I can hire others to do THAT" Well, what if those you hire aren't that good, or made mistakes?? You as the clueless PHB wouldn't be able to see it because you are clueless)... period! apk

Re:no set ratio

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I know it's a joke on the Java logo, but really, I wouldn't rely on a Java developer for anything critical.

Likewise, a C++ developer is completely useless. Much better to have a developer who builds solutions with whichever tool is suited to the job; in the right environment, it's a simple perl script.

Re:no set ratio

[mwsource]

This is why IT is so efficient, we have redundant power: Whenever coffee fails, Mountain Dew kicks in with 0 delay.

Re:no set ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

The total number of people I support with Websites, Desktop Support, etc. has got to be over 100.

I manage 75 users, at 4 different Car Deaerships. 47 of those users are at the Main Dealership.

I also manage 12 Websites, some for the Dealerships and a few with other outside clients.

I also manage a video training lab with 12 more users, 4 Video Rooms connected to the main server and 4 DVRs which split out and run into 3 large LCDs and a projector in different parts of the building. All of this runs to an onsite Web Server to host the Video from the training rooms.

  I am currently in the process of spinning up a Web Hosting & Support Company geared toward Car Dealerships. My current and former employers are both supporting this. The idea is to use 3 technicians from my former employer and have them follow the S.O.P. I have established so they can support a large user base as well.

This thread is interesting to me, because finding ways to reduce the amount of tech support needed has been my goal since I began working on this 18 months ago.

Our goal is for each Technician to be able to support 50 users, with one of the 3 managing the Web Hosting.

Wish us luck, because I'm tired. I don't sleep much. I might work a little more than 40 hours a week, but I've spent a lot of time developing and finding the tools I need to streamline the tasks that need to get done. If I'm lucky maybe it'll pay off.

Re:no set ratio

[Jaggo]

WtF?! Insightful? Informative? You're not joking?!!

Re:no set ratio

[Perf]

I can't wrap my head around the inefficiency of a company in which only 10% of the salaried personnel is responsible for generating all revenue.

The "production" workers were the people who assembled the finished controls and some replacement parts. They were no more "highly skilled" than the actual factory workers in Asia who assemble your computer. They only had to follow a blueprint. A production manager or engineer oversaw their work. There was one or two people who had higher skills.

There were only a few different products, but each was configured for the end use.

Small company. Low volume. High prices. Niche market. Brand recognition.

Revenue was from more than the production department. It came from the original sale, replacement parts, control upgrades, or from service visits. I never saw the actual numbers, but I assume the most of the replacement parts and service visits had a high markup.

Oh, and I'm not so sure their business model was the best, but they were a leader in the field and have been for several decades.

A large part of the company, maybe too large IMHO, was the software department. A lot of prima donna attitudes, with a few real people. Their role was finding and fixing bugs, adding new features, and developing new product. As you can imagine, the software prima donnas made the IT department's job somewhat difficult.

Re:no set ratio

[_Sharp'r_]

1:1400 ratio.

Total of 25 Win XP Pro laptops, everything else on the desktop is Ubuntu 8.04, all internally managed servers (web, database, proxy, filtering, authentication, file server, etc...) are FreeBSD 7, network devices are a mixed bag of brands, and Google Apps handles email, chat, document sharing, etc...

When something needs to be done on all the desktops, you run a script from a FreeBSD box to log into them all at once and take care of it automatically.

Saves a lot of time that way.

Re:no set ratio

[mibus]

Its possible to run an IT staff for several hours durring a coffee supply disruption.

The office I'm in now has a disaster recovery plan for when the coffee machine breaks down (which is recently did). Head down a floor (network operations) and use theirs :)

In Australia

[Techman83]

Global company, 400 staff, 4 IT Staff. We do outsource local support for over seas offices though and have a consulting firm we use for extra hands when needed.

Re:In Australia

[Techman83]

Forgot the OS stuffs. Imaging/Standard Builds/Standard hardware all User equipment Windows XP Sp2/3, Servers mixture of Virtualised/Physical, Windows, Linux, Solaris.

Re:In Australia

[Nerdfest]

Of course, I would image none of the 4 could be even romotely considered 'deadwood'. Sadly that ratio can get very high within IT, and drive the total numbers required up, frequently in a non-linear way.

Re:In Australia

[phyrestang]

That sounds very similar to my company. Semi-Global, 350-400 employees, 3 full-time IT staff. 4 if you count the one guy we have in our Italy office that does 80% Plant/Process Automation, 20% handles hands-on IT issues.

Re:In Australia

[Nik13]

1:100 seems to be around what I've seen in most places too, give or take a little.

Last job, we had around 2500 users & desktops, and we were a dozen IT people handling it all. So 1:200.

-One IT manager overseeing everything
-One webmaster
-One network guru (cisco guy)
-One programmer (in-house apps, helping the webmaster with web apps, writing some scripts, etc)
-One person doing app repackaging (installshield) and updating disk images and such
-A couple guys answering the phone
-A guy looking after the servers primarily
-four techs

Most people shared knowledge, and knew IT stuff pretty good in general, so when someone went on vacation, we could handle the basics of their job just fine (i.e. other guys that knew networking, each tech could handle some extra phone calls for a day, etc)

I've never seen anywhere near 1:7, that's just incredible.

1:100 at many places

[VoidEngineer]

I just left a job at a hospital of 3000 employees, which had an official IT staff of... wait for it..... 12. I was part of the big "departmental restructuring" where the IT staff went up to... 18! And of course they wanted us to be on call 24/7 and would refuse us vacation time because there wasn't anybody to cover for us. Needless to say, I resigned.

But yeah... 1:100 ratio is not unheard of at many hospitals. It's all because of outsourcing....

Re:1:100 at many places

[teh moges]

I used to work for local government and before my position was created, there were 2 IT staff for nearly 200 staff in total. The ratio went down when I started (although I was still only part time), when we had a whopping 2.6 IT staff for around 200 staff in total.

For anything to get done outside of 'everyday stuff', we had to bring in consultants. It doesn't surprise me that larger places don't increase their IT support relatively.

Re:1:100 at many places

[Anonymous Coward]

2 IT staff for 200
2.6 IT staff for 200
The ratio went down
I used to work for local government

Used to? Did they fire you due to your lack of basic maths skills?

Re:1:100 at many places

[ParaShoot]

The ratio went down [from] when I started...when we had a whopping 2.6 IT staff for around 200 staff in total.

I think that was the intended reading, actually.

Re:1:100 at many places

[malkavian]

Yep, I work in a hospital at the moment, with a 'front line' tech staff of about 20 (including managers and internal software developers).
Staff, circa 3.500.
They do the whole 'outsourcing' via buying in applications that the development dept. don't have resource to write, at a yearly licensing cost about on par with what it would take to develop it internally in developer time. All the apps come with "vendor supported" so that it doesn't (in theory) take up IT time. In reality, the vendors (apart from one or two out of the many) never have staff available to do the work when things go wrong, or find a myriad other ways to get out of it, so in reality, it's all IT supported.
There simply aren't enough staff to cope with this; in the NHS in the uk, the 'outsourcing' is very broken in most instances.
I have ideas that I keep presenting that may help with this; to date, the heirarchy isn't listening. Yet.

Re:1:100 at many places

[Antique Geekmeister]

The research departments had their own, in-house personnel, didn't they? Their needs for custom build and special user support often far outweigh the needs of the rest of a large institution, combined. You have to count them, even if they're not in the IT department. IT functions that are transferred wholesale onto an external contract, such as ongoing support for MRI computer equipment, should be counted towards this estimate: that money is coming from someone's pocket.

Re:1:100 at many places

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a dental college where we hade 500 computers (and just as many staff/faculty/students/grad students/residents/assistantes). We are a full service IT and learning recources department.

We have 2 guys that handle the help desk (one of them is the server/network guy). Over flow calls will end up on my phone (The programmer/database administrator) or to the IT director. Our IT Director is highly involved in everything and when not in meetings will get his hands dirty with the rest of us.

We have one more that maintains the clinic system. The IT director and myself also handle the clinic system related calls.

We also have a photogopher, a ilistrator, a web and video production guy, and a audio and broadcast guy.

If you add us all up thats 9:500 ratio. From the staff listed, you can see we do everything. We prabably do more than we should. Should we realy make promotional and historical videos in-house? Should we realy write business critical software in-house? Should we contract out our audio installs? Should we outsource our frontline helpdesk?

Actualy, we tried alot of that. We found out that we just do better work with less overhead and at a fraction of the cost.

Re:1:100 at many places

[Anonymous Coward]

But yeah... 1:100 ratio is not unheard of at many hospitals. It's all because of outsourcing....

I work at a fairly large state university in one of the graduate schools. We have 2.5 FT for IT with a 375 student load and 50 staff and faculty.

There's me (network, database, programming, user training), a tech (laptops, desktops, user training) and a desktop publishing specialist who is ours 16-20 hours a week (so-called web developer who can't grok DHTML and W3C).

And yes, we do support student machines. Ugh. On top of it, we've lost our audio-visual folks so now we're also doing AV systems maintenance and friggin' video editing.

I will say this though: they are appreciative and we do make decent money compared to most IT folks at universities, and the bennies are great.

Re:1:100 at many places

[wanderingknight]

Actually, it's per and the GGP's mother language was Latin-derived (probably Spanish).

Re:1:100 at many places

[wanderingknight]

Disregard that, I'm a blind asshole. I should learn to read.

Re:1:100 at many places

[Anonymous Coward]

Restaurant company - we have 4 IT staff, which includes our director of IT. We have 5,000 employees, 35 servers, 250 desktops, 400+ terminals running Windows XP, 50+ laptops, and Blackberries, etc.

Re:1:100 at many places

[Whitemice]

Where I work: 600 employees, 4 IT staff (the project manager, a help-desk PC jockey guy, a web developer, and me [DBA/Sys-Admin/Net-Admin]).

We're primarily a LINUX shop (12 LINUX servers) with a couple of Windows servers and an AIX box. We are almost entirely virtualized on ESX and an EMC SAN except for our NMS (OpenNMS) and our database servers (Informix & PostgreSQL). We have roughly 300 desktops and ~50 road-warrior laptop types.

It all works pretty smoothly and while I'm on call 24/7, I rarely actually get called (maybe once or twice a year).

I feel we are adequately staffed. A well managed network is, well...., relatively easy to manage.

Re:1:100 at many places

[teh moges]

Sorry, my bad for the 'lingo'. I was put on part-time, 3 days a week. 3/5 is 0.6, which is what my position counts as. If there are two departments, one with 50 part time staff, and one with 50 full time staff, if you just count the number of employees, both departments have the same available employees, although in reality there is a big difference.

Of course, if you are talking about the ratio, then 2:200 is 1:100, while 2.6:200 is about 1:77, so the ratio of employees to IT staff went down.

Re:1:100 at many places

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a local government agency. There are about 250 total employees. IT Staff = 4 full time and 1 half time. So that would be a ratio of about 1-50.

Re:1:100 at many places

[Anonymous Coward]

In highschools it can be 1:2500.

extremely high

[bitflusher]

I am the only human in my own little IT firm, that makes a 1 in 1 ratio...

Re:extremely high

[arth1]

Same here, although at times there are 0% IT staff, like when I'm doing paperwork. And at times there are 200% IT workers, like when I get my better half to lend a hand.

Which brings me over to the question "what is an IT person?"
I am sure that different companies define this differently, and some might consider e.g. payroll processing "IT work", while others include non-IT personnel working for the IT department, like (in order of importance) janitors, cafeteria workers and CIOs. In a big company, they still may be employed in the IT division, and count as IT.

Re:extremely high

[YttriumOxide]

Which brings me over to the question "what is an IT person?"
I am sure that different companies define this differently, and some might consider e.g. payroll processing "IT work", while others include non-IT personnel working for the IT department, like (in order of importance) janitors, cafeteria workers and CIOs. In a big company, they still may be employed in the IT division, and count as IT.

That's a very good point. It can work the other way as well, where you have "IT people" who don't work for the IT department. I have no idea how many people work in my company's "IT Department", because I don't work there and generally have no need to talk to them about anything. I work for a department called the "Solution Centre", which is in charge of finding and developing IT solutions for customers (rather than internal IT, which is what our IT department does). I'm employed primarily as a programmer. So, am I an "IT Person" or not? How about the guy in my department who (amongst other things) is responsible for making sure our test network stays up? He doesn't work in the "IT Department" either, but in almost every way can be considered a sys admin.

If you ONLY count our "IT Department", I GUESS we have a ratio of around 1:100 or maybe less, but if you count people outside of the IT department who do IT related work, it's probably closer to 1:5. We've got somewhere around 40000 employees worldwide (not counting third party companies that "live and die" solely by what we do and for all intents and purposes are part of us, just not from the "business" side)

Our main "normal" IT infrastructure is a mix of Linux and Windows servers for various tasks and I think an AS/400 type system somewhere, with almost exclusively Windows XP workstations for employees. In departments such as mine, we tend to be 25% Linux, 40% Windows, 30% MacOS X and 5% Other (including things like a couple of Solaris boxes, one Mac OS 9, and so on. Most of the people in our department have TWO laptops per person - one (usually WinXP system) for the "corporate network" (where we check our email, etc) and one for the "test network" where we do all our real work. On top of that, we have the mix of systems I just described as desktop systems and servers on our test network. The IT department only looks after our corporate network systems (which are mostly WinXP).

Re:extremely high

[Lershac]

Yeah but how many end users do you support?

I am a one guy shop too, and if I total up my support contracts... I got about 5-600 end users out there I support.

I RARELY do the hand-holding type of support, usually only for owners of the companies I deal with. End users who need training GET IT, but not from support personnel. I find out how they learn best (book, video or in person training) and I get it for them, highly encourage the company owners to pay for training (read that as "require"... if a company wont train its employees to do whats required, I don't work with them).

And all my clients are amazed at how little IT problems they actually have. Most of my job is front loaded, when I pick up a new client, getting them set up correctly and redesigning their infrastructure to do what they need it to do. After that its strictly maintenance with lots of planned expenditures. "Hey that server is 6 years old, lets replace it before we are forced to" type stuff.

None of my clients complain about how much they spend on IT, because invariably its less after my first year with them than it was before.

Re:extremely high

[Anonymous Coward]

IT are, IMHO, the plumbers.

They make sure that everyone has a working PC, that there's a network. They handle the licensing and all that stuff. Support general users, not applications.

They don't develop. That's engineering, not IT.

How many do a company need? Depends how stupid their users are.

Re:extremely high

[cellocgw]

Just out of interest YtO2, do you work for NGC?
We got taken over by them (if this happens to your company, run screaming for the exit!), and their IT Division (yep, a whole separate division) expects everyone to call the help desk and wait for a ticket. They actually were proud to tell us that if a printer went down, they'd have someone out to fix it by the end of the NEXT DAY. Boggles the mind.
And, like you, we 'hide' all our real machines on a subnet, away from their Godzilla-like thumping of the 'main' net. You know, forced upgrades, deletion of "unapproved software," etc.

Re:extremely high

[ralphdaugherty]

Which brings me over to the question "what is an IT person?"
I am sure that different companies define this differently, and some might consider e.g. payroll processing "IT work", while others include non-IT personnel working for the IT department, like (in order of importance) janitors, cafeteria workers and CIOs. In a big company, they still may be employed in the IT division, and count as IT.

      Computer operations is IT. An HR office employee working with payroll who performs some functions on their PC is not a computer operator.

      Non-IT personnel are not IT personnel because they work in an IT department. Big companies do not count them as so. Plus I've never really seen non-IT personnel limited in their function to an IT department except secretaries who do count in the IT department. Heck, generally they do the counting.

  rd

Re:extremely high

[Rhinobird]

I work for the NGC. On the helpdesk even. IT isn't it's own seperate division. It's it own seperate multi-billion dollar a year comany...with it's own sub-divisions. NGC is a BIG company

Re:extremely high

[tompaulco]

Which brings me over to the question "what is an IT person?"
That is exactly my question. Our small firm has technically only one IT person depending on how rigidly you define IT, or about 80% IT if you define it loosely.
The way my company defines it, the programmers and operations are all IT, so there are really only about 6 people out of about 30 that are definitely not in IT. These people jokingly (but somehow not funny to me) refer to themselves as "useless overhead".

Re:extremely high

[linear a]

Actually, it depends more on how stupid the management is. Bad processes, too many ill-considered corporate and standards constraints will have much more influence on how many "plumber IT" types you need.

Re:extremely high

[ff1324]

Being a schizophrenic, I have anywhere from 3-7 users on my system, yet only one is any damned good with a computer.

Re:extremely high

[./]

I am the only human in my own little IT firm, that makes a 1 in 1 ratio...

math bzzt. That should read 1 IT type to 0 non-IT types in your company.

Easy peasy

[Anonymous Coward]

150 users to IT staff of 1
Citrix/windows mixture with Linux A majority are dumb terms.

And Avaya phone switch

There are very few times where I am utterly swamped.

Re:Easy peasy

[Anonymous Coward]

Avaya eh? Did you get delta server to work? The software is a POS.

high School

[NovaHorizon]

When I worked for my high school it was around 400+ desktops, 500 students, ~30-40 staff members and the tech department was 1 guy plus what ever time I had to spare to help him out. so that's what? 200:1 for desktops to us, 270:1 for users to us, and 15-20 to 1 for staff to us. I was able to keep up with almost all the issues by myself honestly.. so yea 7:1 ratio? those techs must have a whole lot work they have to do per change 0.o

Re:high School

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at high school also... 150 desktops, 330 students, 50 staff. Itâ(TM)s just me. I usually have no problem taking care of the place when school is in session. Itâ(TM)s the stuff during the summer like upgrading machines, running cable, installing projectors that can be annoying. But it really depends on the type of company you work for. For education a 250:1 ratio is not bad. Some districts have one guy covering four urban high schools. Thatâ(TM)s like 10,000:1. Explains why tech is so great in our school systemsâ¦

Re:high School

[kehren77]

Hmm... I work for an elementary school with about 300 computers, 100 staff, and 750 students. And it's just me.

Overall our district has about 900 computers, 650 staff and about 2500 students. All of that is for 4 techs and "director" of the tech department who has little actual tech skills.

so 225:1 computer to IT, 787.5:1 users(students and staff) to IT or 162.5:1 for staff to IT.

there can be 2 reasons

[extirpater]

1- The company she works is a partner company for CIA.
2- Non-IT people are over 70+ years old, Joe Sixpacks.

Very heterogenous environment: 1-in-28

[cerberusss]

I'm working at a semi-governmental organisation and I'm frankly amazed at how efficient we are. It's a mixed shop, with Cisco for network equipment, Novell for authentication/file/print sharing/mail servers, Sun for the Unix infrastructure and Linux for all secondary servers. The desktops are 25% Linux, 75% Windows XP.

We're with 200 people, most of them engineers or scientists. Our IT department consists of 7 people.

Re:Very heterogenous environment: 1-in-28

[NovaHorizon]

well.. it helps that most engineers and scientists had to take computer courses and don't have to call you when they see "Internet Explorer has encountered an error and must close." ;)

Re:Very heterogenous environment: 1-in-28

[Just Some Guy]

You described my work environment pretty well, except we're 5:60. We have an internal legacy application maintainer, an internal new application developer, a Windows PC admin, a Windows server admin, and me (web dev, Unix admin, network admin, etc.). We'd be hard pressed to whittle that down.

Re:Very heterogenous environment: 1-in-28

[asc99c]

That's an excellent point, which I've not seen made elsewhere.

I work in a small company of about 60, with 1 proper IT person. We have Windows, Linux (various distros), AIX, Solaris, HPUX, Tru-64, OpenVMS and even older stuff. But 50 of my colleagues are full-time software engineers so can sort out the problems themselves. The sole IT person handles stuff mainly for the admin staff and is not overworked even at the 60:1 ratio.

I have done some management reports in Excel that set up custom menus etc. to look at first glance like a full application instead of just an Excel spreadsheet. It used VBA macros to turn off a whole load of the standard menu and status bars and generally made a bit of a mess of Excel if you opened the document and then killed the Excel process.

For one customer, this caused enormous problems, because a user kept killing the process as their standard way of closing the reports. They kept calling their IT team to fix Excel. We were never called about it until one day an IT person realised the reports were Excel in disguise. I just told them to close the reports normally and Excel is automatically switched back to it's usual state.

I do second-line support for some of our customers, and the worst case is when you have people who aren't really computer users, but have to use a PC as part of their job. I've seen ratios of workers to informal IT support staff (classed generally as the operations team) down as low as 3:1. This is generally when we have brought in a computerised system to replace a manual one, and the ratio doesn't stay that bad, but I have also seen approximately the submitters 7:1 ratio being required.

Re:Very heterogenous environment: 1-in-28

[cerberusss]

You described my work environment pretty well, except we're 5:60.[ ... ] We'd be hard pressed to whittle that down.

I've saw there's some development going on but I have to admit our IT dept. isn't doing any of that. Almost all needed software is bought.

If the scientists/engineers need new software themselves, it's written internally in the separate departments, so that's the difference in staffing between your and my working environment.

Sixt has that without outsourcing

[Casandro]

Sixt, a german car rental company which is mostly based on Linux (including the desktop) it is roughly 1:100. They have about 2000 employees and about a dozend of them are in the IT-department.

Re:Sixt has that without outsourcing

[Anonymous Coward]

This has to be nonsense...we are heavily investing in IT at the moment

Law Firm

[hal9k]

Mostly Windows XP / Server 2003
19 IT Folk / 483 Total Employees =~ 4%

Makes sense

[dotancohen]

Her IT department is layered, not flat. The fact that simple changes take 6 months shows that it's not 5000 doing anything useful, it's probably more like 2000 doing something useful, who have to ask the 1000 above them, who need signatures from the 500 above them, who need approval from the 200 above them, etc. They sheer number of them is hurting their performance, not helping.

Re:Makes sense

[Telvin_3d]

Until you get the next time where someone has a genius idea with a subtle flaw that doesn't get caught until it goes through the 3rd level of red tape.
When you are talking about a big enough organization, any amount of bureaucracy and layers will pay for itself if it prevents a single huge mistake every couple years.

Re:Makes sense

[WinterSolstice]

I have repeatedly worked for exactly this kind of company.

As a 13 year IT veteran who has worked everywhere from .com startups to world-wide multi-billion dollar fortune 100s, I must say that you hit an amazing amount of bloat quite quickly.

I can't say what the ideal ration is, but my current company is too big at about 1:10, and my previous company was 5k people with an IT of less than 30 (about 166:1).

The previous company was amazingly hard work when we had 15 IT, and then suddenly the C levels decided we need help and added 4 managers, 3 directors, a VP, and a change control board. We only got about 10 actual "workers". Productivity plummeted.

My current company has an IT so big that we spend all of our time fighting with each other. It takes months to create new user accounts, months to get simple servers built, 2 weeks to schedule a reboot, etc. The users and the business hate us.

A DOD shop I worked for had a staff of 500 for 12k users, and it worked pretty efficiently. Of course, they were almost entirely former/current military. This led to always knowing precisely what you were supposed to be doing and a really well run group. Maybe that makes a difference?

So, while I can't say what the exact ratio is, it is pretty low. I also think the skill level has something do with it - a small team of skilled people "bond" and form a fast moving and smooth team. A huge team lends itself to infighting, argument, one-upsmanship, face saving, and general worthless behavior.

Re:Makes sense

[blippo]

I'd guess that the subtle flaw would *fly* through the 3rd level or red tape,
as the devil is in the details, and generally not in power point presentations.

Re:Makes sense

[pipingguy]

a small team of skilled people "bond" and form a fast moving and smooth team. A huge team lends itself to infighting, argument, one-upsmanship, face saving, and general worthless behavior.

Bingo.

Re:Makes sense

[Tablizer]

The users and the business hate us.

The same people who install browser tool bars that crash their system, waste 3 of your hours having you read the HP laserjet manual because they can't get their favorite font to print in order to impress a big-wig, etc. Bad users often want the freedom to make a mess, but don't want to pay for the clean-up.

There needs to be better priority allocation such that those who abuse IT services stop getting a free ride.

       

Re:Makes sense

[dotancohen]

The users and the business hate us.

The same people who install browser tool bars that crash their system, waste 3 of your hours having you read the HP laserjet manual because they can't get their favorite font to print in order to impress a big-wig, etc. Bad users often want the freedom to make a mess, but don't want to pay for the clean-up.

There needs to be better priority allocation such that those who abuse IT services stop getting a free ride.

     

There needs to be better priority allocation such that those who abuse IT services stop getting a free ride.

There are those who would argue that the _purpose_ of an IT team is to help users who have installed a malicious toolbar or need to print a specific font.

Re:Makes sense

[Colin Smith]

Which is why you have

development -> testing -> live

Bureaucracy doesn't create quality, testing does.
 

Re:Makes sense

[dotancohen]

Until you get the next time where someone has a genius idea with a subtle flaw that doesn't get caught until it goes through the 3rd level of red tape.
When you are talking about a big enough organization, any amount of bureaucracy and layers will pay for itself if it prevents a single huge mistake every couple years.

Quite the opposite. Each layer can then try to blame the one above / below it. When there are only 2 / 3 layers of bureaucracy, each takes on more responsibility.

Re:Makes sense

[Lonewolf666]

There needs to be better priority allocation such that those who abuse IT services stop getting a free ride.

There are those who would argue that the _purpose_ of an IT team is to help users who have installed a malicious toolbar or need to print a specific font.

And then there is me who says they should ask up front if they don't have a clue. As in "Organizing my files with Windows Explorer is troublesome, can you recommend an alternative file manager?" instead of installing some random software from the internet.

Now I would not crucify someone for a one-time slip in that department, but a user who crashes his machine every two months needs to have his admin rights revoked.

Printing a certain font, however, can be a legitimate need. As in "you have already published stuff in that font and you want more of the same for consistency".

Re:Makes sense

[techno-vampire]

My current company has an IT so big that we spend all of our time fighting with each other. It takes months to create new user accounts, months to get simple servers built, 2 weeks to schedule a reboot, etc.

Let me guess: your company's productivity is suffering so much because people can't get their work done that profits are down. If I were you, I'd be expecting layoffs, but not in the IT department. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find IT expanding because management doesn't understand that IT bloat is the problem not the solution.

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Well maybe. But it really only takes ONE foul apple. At my current position, we are 5 1/2 people. Our "boss" (not disciplinary boos but she has been in the project for 15 years, i.e. since the start) is the single point of failure. Nothing gets done (well it does, but some cleanups I did recently have been in the bug tracker for over a year) because she sits between us, the developers, and the customer. Everything has to go through her and things that could take hours, take weeks, just because shes in between. You can't even send out test files for exports or reports for cleanups, everything has to go through her. If you want to make the customer happy, by sending it out to them directly once it's done, you should be prepared for some serious yelling.

No multiple layers of approval stuff or anything, just that one person. And our disciplinary boss is too much of a wimp to do something about it (although we've all complained about it to him more than once).

Re:Makes sense

[Nutria]

as the devil is in the details, and generally not in power point presentations.

That's the most salient point ever made on Slashdot...

Re:Makes sense

[John Hasler]

> Bad users often want the freedom to make a mess, but don't want to pay for the clean-up.

Patiently and cheerfully help him clean up his mess. Then send a memo to his boss explaining (calmly and objectively) exactly what you did.

Re:Makes sense

[Registered Coward v2]

There needs to be better priority allocation such that those who abuse IT services stop getting a free ride.

There are those who would argue that the _purpose_ of an IT team is to help users who have installed a malicious toolbar or need to print a specific font.

And then there is me who says they should ask up front if they don't have a clue. As in "Organizing my files with Windows Explorer is troublesome, can you recommend an alternative file manager?" instead of installing some random software from the internet.

Now I would not crucify someone for a one-time slip in that department, but a user who crashes his machine every two months needs to have his admin rights revoked.

Printing a certain font, however, can be a legitimate need. As in "you have already published stuff in that font and you want more of the same for consistency".

IT is a service organization - it exists to support the users of the technology.

That means helping fix problems - even if they are user generated.

IT should play a role in deciding what technology is used and what is deployed; but the users need to be the ones that say if it meets their needs.

IT shouldn't decide if you can use a font or not, OTOH limiting what can be installed makes sense from a reliability and license compliance standpoint.

The problem for IT shops that are viewed as a block rather than a helper is that they have no friends once outsourcing gets bought up. They are viewed strictly as a cost center; and cheaper generally wins the battle once that viewpoint takes hold.

Re:Makes sense

[Antique Geekmeister]

Except that I've been that user: as a developer, for departmental needs, I was consistently debugging things before the IT department had gotten to testing them and warned them of the problem and the workarounds. I should not need a 'business case' to explain that they should be using IMAP, not POP, nor have to justify why I spent a day of my _own_ dapartment's time for our internal needs before notifying them that they're facing a support nightmare if they don't change their own practices.

But precisely this has happened in a large organization. It had great tracking of whose pocket the money came from, but wasted huge overhead in providing that tracking, and actively drove out competent people who wanted to work on problems, not forms.

Re:Makes sense

[Just Some Guy]

any amount of bureaucracy and layers will pay for itself if it prevents a single huge mistake every couple years.

You're conveniently ignoring the opportunity cost of shooting down the occasional single huge success that might otherwise come along. Apple as a bureaucracy: "we're a computer company, not an entertainment company! An MP3 player? Can you imagine how stupid we'd feel if that bombed?"

Re:Makes sense

[bwalling]

In healthcare, and the ratio is 8 IT to 1000 employees. We've been as high as 12 IT to 1000 employees. 12 was better than 8, but we're doing fine with 8. The benefit is that we have *good* IT people. Stuff is done right and it's done right the first time.

Re:Makes sense

[Daengbo]

Make sure there is an hourly rate to bill inter-departmentally. The monetary pressure will work the situation out.

Re:Makes sense

[canuck57]

Her IT department is layered, not flat. The fact that simple changes take 6 months shows that it's not 5000 doing anything useful, it's probably more like 2000 doing something useful, who have to ask the 1000 above them, who need signatures from the 500 above them, who need approval from the 200 above them, etc. They sheer number of them is hurting their performance, not helping.

I would be surprised if the ratio was that good. I just left an environment earlier this year, and engineered my exit. Stole a page from management, why quit when you can get a severance?

17000 users, 15 IT managers, 60 "business analysts" (*of which none could ever code, configure or design) and 25 overworked technical types. Management got into the WeSaySo against rationality so the techs were quitting. Me, I made a snarky remark to a manager and got severanced. He didn't know it was planned until my exit as I saw the patterns of firings.

In my view, the ratio of _effective_ IT to the business was 25:17000. Was not a nice place to work and major projects were often 2 years behind and flopping like dying fish with the techs taking the blame. It is now one of the questions I research.

Re:Makes sense

[Lonewolf666]

That sounds like you were not one of those people who regularly cry for help because they have inadvertently installed viruses and other malware. Assuming you were halfway polite in wording your warnings, the IT department should thank you for helping with their job instead of complaining.

Developers who know what they are doing and clean up their own messes were not meant in my post.

Re:Makes sense

[Lonewolf666]

IT is a service organization - it exists to support the users of the technology.

That means helping fix problems - even if they are user generated.

There is a point where cleaning up after inept people becomes an unreasonable drain on an organization. If that is a problem for you depends on your position. If you are paid by incident and more user stupidity means more money for you, fine. And I concede that telling the user in question he is a waste of IT resources may be difficult.

I've actually been in a similar position, on the software development side:
Several years ago, I worked on a software project that had barely reached a stage that could be described as "beta" after 5 years. The main reason was that it was a moving target, the customer changed requirements almost as fast as we could implement them. But they paid by the hour, at 170 Swiss Francs per hour (1 Swiss Franc (CHF) = 0.91593 US Dollar (USD)). So I guess our management was quite happy with the situation ;-)

Re:Makes sense

[spotvt01]

Which is why you have

development -> testing -> live

Bureaucracy doesn't create quality, testing does.

Couldn't disagree more: testing just finds defects it doesn't _produce_ quality. Quality engineers produce quality requirements, quality architecture, quality design, quality implementation, quality V&V, etc, etc.

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you do the math there? 12,000 / 500 = 24.
1 IT person for every 24 users. How is that low? Everyone else has been mentioning ratios like 1:100. 1:24 is pretty high, not low. The 1:7 ratio mentioned in the original question was crazy high, probably because of mainframes, I'm guessing.

Re:Makes sense

[$pace6host]

I just imagined a .ppt bullet chart with bullet #4 being "Allow SQL code injections". Then I tried to imagine if anyone 2 levels up would notice it, understand it, or just check off the "review complete" milestone...

Re:Makes sense

[Antique Geekmeister]

Developers who expose the flaws in IT, however, are sometimes despised by IT managers. Many of our complaints and issues are becase we did not instal the authorized tool, or we need something "unsupported". It's not inadvertent: it's deliberate, because we need it for our work. We are the exceptions that "prove the rule". And I've consistently tried to be polite with my notifications, and warnings, and offers of workarounds, and offers to be the testbed for new technologies. But it consistently makes me, and the people I work with, take far more than our percentages of IT help based on numbers of staff.

I sympathize with the results of clueless "newbies" and having to bail them out. But I've often been classed with them. And they often do their clueless behavior because the IT staff can't be bothered to do the work they need: I sympathize with them. Being told that IE7 is "under review" and that Firefox is "not supported" causes people who want tabs with their browsers to get upset, but it's typical in a "highly managed" environment.

Re:Makes sense

[Nutria]

I just imagined a .ppt bullet chart with bullet #4 being "Allow SQL code injections". Then I tried to imagine if anyone 2 levels up would notice it, understand it, or just check off the "review complete" milestone...

They'd probably think it a feature. It would be an interesting experiment...

Re:Makes sense

[Tablizer]

There are those who would argue that the _purpose_ of an IT team is to help users who have installed a malicious toolbar or need to print a specific font.

In an ideal world, yes. In practice there is often not enough time and resources for those things such that *some* kind of priority system is needed. It's like building freeway's: the more you build the more houses and cars come around to fill them up.
     

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

IT is a service organization - it exists to support the users of the technology.

Yeah but if my main job is managing and maintaining all the SANs, NAS devices and fabric switching while my secondary job is assisting with the people who do the ESX administration then I shouldn't have to be wasting my time getting rid of spyware on an end users PC.

At my current job there is no help desk. So end users just grab whatever IT person is within reach and we have to help them with their crap end user issues. It is stupid.

Re:Makes sense

[Rich0]

Agreed 100%

Testing is actually a good part of quality development. However, the best testing is the kind of testing performed directly by the developers on small chunks of code (unit testing).

Too many companies view testing as something you do once the whole project is "done". The problem is that when you find problems at that point you end up just saying "oh well, we'll just live with it" and deploy it anyway. If you're going to do that, why bother testing at all? You need to spend your money on preventing problems, not discovering them.

Re:Makes sense

[cavehobbit]

Which is why you have

development -> testing -> live

Bureaucracy doesn't create quality, testing does.

That is provided 'test' is not spelled 'prod'

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Her IT department is layered, not flat. The fact that simple changes take 6 months shows that it's not 5000 doing anything useful, it's probably more like 2000 doing something useful, who have to ask the 1000 above them, who need signatures from the 500 above them, who need approval from the 200 above them, etc. They sheer number of them is hurting their performance, not helping.

I work for a Fortune 100 company that matches the above. We are fairly flat managerially. Our management is not the one in the way - in fact, I say they try to stay out of the way.

Change is often glacial because IT does not call the shots. Business determines what is done. The business wants changes not because IT says they're needed, they want changes because IT proves they improve the bottom line. The business focus (and the changes they focus on) are those that the business consider important.
The business is very concerned about making certain that the changes that are done are the ones that make the biggest impact to them - not to some geek who thinks it will be cool.

For many companies - especially financial services - they're now doing huge volumes of business with minimal paper; it used to take 5 or 6 employees to touch something or move paper. The leading concern of these companies is 'how can we NOT touch this as there is cost to us touching it'. This has meant huge cutbacks in clerical and what some of us would consider "blue collar" office workers (for lack of a better term)

Very large systems are in place to process transactions - changes that used to be manual and that used to involve shelves and shelves of paper (the floors had to be reinforced to hold the paper).

For many of these companies the distinction is the packages they sell, which means that while you may start with an out of the box solution sold by a vendor, you have to customize the living hell out if it so that you can market a unique solution to customers. (In the end, all credit cards, 401ks, insurance policies, etc. do the same thing. But what is in your wallet does not match mine)

Someone else hit it on the head too - for these companies, IT can consist of the help desk, the network techs, the PC support staff, and many others in addition to the actual able to code geeks. The number of what most of us would consider "true developers" is low - most of IT are people doing production support, testing support, or just making certain that when someone clicks 'pay' the money flows where it is supposed to flow.

Downtime must be avoided at all costs. Change is slow because rapid change can be risky - and risk is avoided at all costs. The target is "5 9's" of uptime. And bonuses are tied to those 5 9's as much as they are to "did project X reach completion".

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

testing "creates" quality?

nope - it verifies and validates it.

clear unambiguous requirements and clear simple (but no simpler) design CREATES quality.

come on - this is 101 stuff!

Re:Makes sense

[leenks]

Why are users allowed to install browser tool bars?

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree 100%. However:
          1) Windows shops. Windows is unstable, and a stable Windows image becomes unstable when stuff is added to it. So, all-Windows IT shops don't want you to add anything non-sanctioned to it. And, since Windows copies might blow up just by themselves, need virus updates, etc. etc., they tend to be very busy.

            2) Legal. Some businessess, they will blame IT for any illegal software on machines, even when the user put it on themselves. Therefore, the "no you can't put software on there" attitude.

          I have not worked on Windows shops, and so neither was a problem.

Re:Makes sense

[Tablizer]

Why are users allowed to install browser tool bars?

If you take them off of install mode, then they need to call you every time that want a Flash upgrade, etc.

Re:Makes sense

[leenks]

This should all be managed centrally though - it isn't that hard to deploy things automatically on demand. Office workstations should be locked down for the majority of staff - they don't NEED the latest version of Flash etc for most things, nor do they need floppy / cdrom / usb access for that matter.

Re:Makes sense

[Tablizer]

they don't NEED the latest version of Flash etc for most things

Most things, yeah, but when they encounter an app they need that does, it sets of an update storm.
   

Crazy..

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow.. that's insane.

SOX compliance causing the insanity?

Re:Crazy..

[TedRiot]

I was just about to think no-one would bring up SOX, when AC came to the rescue. The SOX requirements AFAIK for IT are insane. People doing development aren't allowed to touch production systems, for example.

I met a guy recently that works for a US company that has to follow SOX. They have a quarterly audit which lasts 8 weeks at a time and has more than 600 audit points for IT alone. This means that 2/3 of the time of year they are under audit. And if you fail the same point in two audits in a row, it's byebye.

Re:Crazy..

[canuck57]

I was just about to think no-one would bring up SOX, when AC came to the rescue. The SOX requirements AFAIK for IT are insane. People doing development aren't allowed to touch production systems, for example.

I think that Sarbanes and Oxley must have hated IT technical staff. SOX has turned out to be a nightmare for us. And worse yet, SOX isn't effective. The auditors miss lots that would ordinary be caught in a non-SOX environment. SOX hinders the operational staff so much, details go amiss.

I am watching my current environment, looks like the CIO is pushing finance and CIO that if we want SOX, we have to fund SOX and operate it as a dedicated group towards that end. What a novel concept. As most IT shops didn't get head count with SOX.

Re:Crazy..

[mikael]

People doing development aren't allowed to touch production systems, for example.

If this rule were obeyed in the UK, then we probably wouldn't have contractors downloading personal records of millions of people onto memory sticks and losing them.

That seems standard for creative software companies who are developing in-house applications. The last thing you want is some screwy bug in the application silently corrupting every piece of content because the programmer was sure he had fixed every bug. Normal practise is to have someone else do the testing and approval.

Re:Crazy..

[TedRiot]

I haven't studied the data losses in UK to enough detail that I would be able to comment on how the SOX practice would have prevented them from happening. What I wonder the most is why would someone need to haul data of 4 million people on an unencrypted USB stick..

And yes, I know the reasoning behind no development people touching production systems. The point is, that if the same person cannot develop something and install it into production, you need more headcount. And more if there has to be a third person to test it before release and so on. One might argue that it would be enough that an audit trail is produced that someone other than the developer has tested it and approved it into production, but SOX (according to my minimal knowledge of it) seems to take risk reduction and audit trails very far by separating tasks to different people instead of just demanding processes that produce sufficient audit trails and acknowledge and evauluate risks.

Re:Crazy..

[TedRiot]

Not so much hate as distrust, I think. Doing IT management I kind of understand the fact that IT staff often has a lot of power to do damage because from a practical point of view they need that power. I am myself at the moment in the middle of a risk management project (no full SOX, thank god) and the funny thing is that the upper management refuses to see that more controls and more audit trails means more used resources in both IT and business (if they are viewed as separate entities).

While I'm at this, the access management in the company I speak of above goes (due to SOX) so that all access to data and systems is given on a temporary basis. There has to be a written approval from the data or application owner to grant access and it has to have an expiration date. In the audit they check that every access is approved by the data or application owner from the business side and if the date on the form is passed, the access must be revoked. This takes a lot of resources comparing to a normal business where access is given basically based on the job title to everything the employee needs.

Re:Crazy..

[gavinjolly]

Having worked in a bank that was planning to move to SOX I always wondered how they would do without Excel. A lot of their system interfaces spat out a CSV (or similar data file), someone checked it in Excel and corrected it (Because either the in or out interface had some issues they could not spend the time to fix) and then upload it. This is especially the case when interfacing with Mainframe systems. Generally, the business process is like this

1. Export the file to CSV
2. Check it for errors and fix as required
3. Add in the rows it always missed
4. Save the file, sometimes using VBA written by the last person working there that has left the country
5. Convert to EBCDIC(??) using the dodgy converter downloaded from the internet
6. FTP to mainframe
7. Hope like hell it works again this month and you dont need to raise a Business Case to get a developer in Bangalore to work on it

Re:Crazy..

[ContractualObligatio]

People doing development aren't allowed to touch production systems, for example.

From a general technical perspective, why would you want to skip the test stage? From a security / fraud perspective, why would you want to give your biggest security risk (your own employees) unfettered, untrackable, potentially automated access to sensitive data?

Re:Crazy..

[TedRiot]

I wouldn't skip test stage and (as I said in an earlier reply) I understand the reasons for this.

The point is that you need more headcount to do things the SOX-way when you can't have the same people doing different things no matter how much audit trail they produce.

Re:Crazy..

[ContractualObligatio]

Fair point; my experience is with companies that do have that headcount. Although if you understand the reasons, then categorising them as "insane" implies you don't agree with them.

I guess I'm curious how many listed firms are so small that development and administration are performed by the same person. I mean, if I were a shareholder I don't know I'd like the idea of an IT department producing systems that only the developer was capable of deploying and managing. From a management point of view, requiring apps and changes be produced that will be implemented by another person strikes me as a useful discipline. My experience is only with companies large enough for this to be a practical necessity, however.

(on a related note, the software vendor I work for sells amongst other things software deployment management tools. At a certain scale, producing an audit trail is the free byproduct of automating a process for simple efficiencies. This effectively forces that particular segregation of duties irrespective of SOX. Of course, a byproduct of the "certain scale" threshold is that I don't have direct experience of companies with the problem you describe.)

All that said, In the context of various related back office functions (finance, audit, security, risk), just how much incremental headcount are we talking about in the context of justifying major security holes? Are we really talking any difference at all?

I'm not denying that SOX has been excessive overall, but this most basic security requirement has never struck me as unreasonable for a listed company. What has seemed ridiculous is the way that companies put more money into SOX - let's leaving aside for now whether that's a good or bad thing - and it gets swallowed up by the finance function. Therefore the workload and headcount impact on IT is ugly. Which gets back to "what is an IT person" issue elsewhere in the thread.

"how much it differs by OS platform"

[RightSaidFred99]

Oh come on. "Oooh, gee, I bet those poor suckers managing Windo$e from Micro$haft are way worse!" (cue geeky dweeb laugh..'dur hee schnee snort snort tee hee').

I see what you're driving at, and all, it's just that it's stupid. The fact is that it comes down to the quality of the admin more than it does the platform. A crappy Linux admin is going to spend a lot of time managing 50 systems the same way a crappy Windows admin is. Either system provides the tools to effectively manage a large environment if you know how to use them.

Re:"how much it differs by OS platform"

[dbIII]

However a home computer operating system designed without reliability in mind and driven mainly by a graphical interface is a lot harder to keep running in bulk. There are good third party tools to work around the limitations so it ALMOST evens out with identical win32 systems cloned from an image VS a heterogeneous environonment of six kinds of *nix.

You have to remember that we poor suckers either manage both or get called in when the Win32 folks get overwhelmed. It isn't just pointless name calling. Now if the MS Server line was being used instead of home systems like XP or Vista it is a bit of a different story but it is home computer systems that end up on desks instead. Those products eat up vast amounts of time hence the requirement to get more people to look after it and the requirement to standardise and lock it down as much as possible. Even fanboys should have noticed the amount of time it takes to keep users free from malware.

Re:"how much it differs by OS platform"

[idfubar]

To be fair, design and implementation of an infrastructure is just as important as who administers it... those crappy admins might be living with the legacy of someone else's choices. administers

Re:"how much it differs by OS platform"

[initialE]

I can't tell if you're trolling or your company really bought a bunch of XP home or vista home licenses to use with a windows domain environment. If you would put in the money to get pro/business, you'd see that most of the tools available to manage the desktops and the servers are identical, from security policies, to management tools, to single-sign-on accounts. So the moral of the story for you is, stop being cheap on the desktops (if you're a microsoft shop that is)

Re:"how much it differs by OS platform"

[dbIII]

I can't tell if you're trolling or your company really bought a bunch of XP home or vista home licenses

I've come in to clean up the mess on one occasion after this has been done and it can be a truly spectacular mess if some idiot has tried to move 100 desktops from NT4 to XP Home overnight (he and his assistants were fired during this migration). I've seen the side effects at another place - a client that had faxes trapped in their shambolic MS system for over a week. It is far more common than you would expect.

On the other hand - XP "Pro" even when properly run was well and truly a hobby OS up until SP2 and even now is a horrible time sink. The current place is a *nix environment simply because it is a niche market that Microsoft did not notice - however there are a few Win2k, XP and Vista machines where required. XP IMHO is still only worth the longer start up times and the random times the user just has to stare at an unmoving screen if there are no Win2k drivers. The increased "security" of XP is irrelevant since it still needs to be isolated from the outside world just as much as Win2k, and Vista is only relevant when required applications will actually run on it (improving situation). Microsoft has taught users to think that computers are slow and unreliable.

Re:"how much it differs by OS platform"

[initialE]

Ah. An old-timer I see. Well today's situation is really quite different from those days. Not so much issues with legacy hardware since people have started retiring equipment from the NT era, (wireless is still a pain due to it's unpredictability though), more control available to the administrator overall, more vectors via which security can be compromised (you try to run a SOHO without internet access nowadays, or demand that people block access to thumbdrives even). Yes, you're not really describing the situation on the ground anymore. XP doesn't have to be a "horrible time sink", not if you find the tools to do what you have to do.

What about technical vs. non-technical within IT?

[HockeyPuck]

I'd be much more interested in the ratio of technical IT people to non-technical. I'm not referring to managers of IT staff, but the throngs of Project Managers. I'm at a large networking company that rhymes with CrISCO and it seems whenever we have a hiring freeze in IT, they are still pouring in the Project Managers. I haven't figured out what they manage, but there sure is a lot of them.

Ad Agency

[absent_speaker]

We had 640 employees, 4 locations and 9 IT staff.

Can easily handle 120 end users amongst 2 Staff

[duncanbiscuits]

150 pc's and laptops currently being used, 2 IT staff. Mining Industry.

My numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

I run everything that relates to IT (from budgeting, purchasing, Telco, ISP contract negotiations, servers, hardware, software, user support) all by myself at a company, listed on the stock exchange. We have about 60 users at our main office and about 25 at an other. Mostly Windows shop with some Linux servers, workstations, some Macs, plenty of data, database, support for a great variety of applications from financial stuff to animation, video production. Not even server vendor support contract.

It all depends

[Anonymous Coward]

It all depends on what you do and how heavily people rely on IT (and the complexity of the IT). I worked at a spook house. Security was the big item, but 1 IT person for 20 people was about right. I worked at another place that had a lot of live data, GIS, bi-directional streaming data (both networked and SCADA) and half a dozen outside agencies feeding or being fed data. Two IT people for 9 users (at any given time, the place was very much 24/7/365) was about right.

Public School sector

[racerx509]

I currently work for a very overcrowded high school, and the ratio is 2 IT for 300 non. We have 300 staff, but in addition to the staff are another 3000 students(thats unique emails and logins for everyone, students included). As for equipment, theres roughly 10 servers, 450 desktops, 450 laptops and 11 wiring closets with cisco equipment in each.

Most of it is running all wintel stuff, with the occaisional bits of linux and a mac every now and again in the bunch.

Re:Public School sector

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn. I thought I had it bad. Public university sattelite campus--four staff for 200-ish full-time faculty, another 200+ part-time/adjunct faculty, plus Windows domain accounts for 600+ students. E-mail (mostly) handled by main campus.

Depends on the industry...

[religious freak]

The friend of this poster may have worked in a very highly regulated industry, such as financial services, healthcare, etc. If that is the case, in many instances that will lead to more IT folks relative to the overall core business.

I happen to work for a very large bank. We've got tons of IT folks and we have a very structured (and IMO a very organized) method of change control. Many times, this is the business's choice, but some of it relates to government regulation. This obviously makes sense... purely software firms can have wiggle room and room for software defects when they go live; however, banks do not have that wiggle room. There are heavy handed tactics government agencies can use to put the smack down on a bank for massive screwups (and this has happened), but there's the PR cost as well. If a bank makes the news for losing depositors' money, that literally could drive the bank out of business if the screwups were bad enough. I suspect the same is true for every regulated industry and (to a lessor extent) every gigantic company.

I am a tiny cog in a massive wheel and and freggin' love it.

Re:Depends on the industry...

[JPLemme]

At the financial companies where I've worked, the ratio of IT to non-IT people has been about 1:3.

One factor is that an awful lot of large financial firms have had IT departments since the 1960s. If you were to start up a new bank today, you would probably buy all off-the-shelf components and need relatively few in-house IT people to manage the vendors and support the end users. But if you started in 1965 then you've got lots of in-house applications that were built over the last 40 years, and a large, capable, and powerful in-house IT staff that is more comfortable building new capabilities from scratch than being dependent on vendors.

And to agree with the original post, the need to get these things RIGHT the first (or at worst, the second) time tends to give the IT department additional power and control.

Then you have to factor in that if you're in the financial industry, you don't really need a lot of people to build widgets, drive trucks, man cash registers, etc. and it's not uncommon for 95% of customer interactions to occur via the web or automated phone interfaces. (When was the last time you actually talked to a human at your bank?) So there isn't really a need for many people who *aren't* in the IT department.

Small time

[Sporked_1]

I work for a small school district, approx. 450 users (350 kids and the rest staff), a mix of 250 win desktops and laptops, about to roll out 180 macs in two weeks and it's just me. I have a director, that uh... "directs", and a data manager that does just that, but it's just me for installs and support for a district that spans 1750 square miles. Sure it's a little nuts sometime, okay nuts most of the time, but it seems to work. Someone once recommended 1 support person per 50 users, but I guess it depends on a lot of different things, such as how organized the shop is and availability of qualified personnel in the local employment pools. Some places may be forced to operate with larger workloads on fewer staff due to factors like these.

Full-time or part-time?

[KingRobot]

We get by with 1 full-time and 3-part time, for 4 locations and about 100 users.

Huh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on my experience, and from the experience of my friends who also work in I.T., that seems like way too many I.T. people. My company is a small-medium business with a ratio of 1-25! And I still sometimes have down time... Granted, I wouldn't expect this ratio to scale for a fortune 500 company, but still... 1-7? Wow. At the same time, I guess it depends on the nature of the company. If they have a programming department writing internal software, the numbers could climb very quickly. It is easy to staff 20 - 30 developers if you're a company that size, in constant need of custom software, testing, and patching. The simple changes in network configuration might also make sense, but again, it depends. If they have to shut down part of the network for 10 minutes to change something, they probably need approval, and that will have to wait awhile to blend with other projects that also need downtime. At one place I know of, a rather large real estate company, down time has to be approved because they lose X-amount of profit every minute they're offline. If they go down for 10 or 15 minutes it's a big deal. I can imagine that being an issue with a fortune 500 company as well, given their size.

many moons ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

in an engineering college, 2000+ students, 200 staff and faculty, 1 IT person. But that was back in the days of vaxes and rs232 terminals and a smattering of workstations as donated and in small labs.

Once the PC's rolled in, there was no way to keep up.

hmm

[extirpater]

We're exactly talking about this, you got the point! Congratulations! Take your xanax pill next time.

Re:hmm

[Sporked_1]

Who's got time for xanax? I'm going full throttle for total burnout and the early checkout. I've already gotten the heart upgrade (icd/pacemaker) since I started, stress related, stoking up on my first ulcer and I've only been here 2 years. On the other hand, I'm a wireless device now!

1 to 9, nearly all MS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the only Linux desktop where I work. Hopefully that will change soon.

Most everything is MS, including servers. We have an additional outside consultant for Cisco equipment and MS software. Good times...

Small law firm, 55 people

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the only guy full time, we have an Outsourcing crew that covers me for hit the highway scenarios. I support 200 total software pieces, 110 nodes. ~6 Servers are W2K3 and 2 linux, clients are XP. I'm not that busy. They love the work I do, and it's mellow.

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[hachete]

2:1 in the place where I work. Yes, that's 2/3 managers to 1/3 programmers. I'd be interested in hearing of other ratios.

My old orkplace

[tyldis]

250 employees on 200 computers.
500 students on 100 computers.
8 locations.
10 servers.
Ancient infrastructure (NT4 and NetWare) desperately needing an upgrade.
IT staff: just me.

This was for a Norwegian muncipality a few years ago. It was fun since I could control every aspect of things, and develop most things from scratch.
NT4 got replaced by a mix of Linux and Windows 2003 and hardware inrastructure renewed.

The downside was work 24/7 and no real vacation. I lasted two years before I ran away.

Now, as for ratio i don't think it is symmetrical. Having your IT staff go from 1 to 2 will give you very little extra beyond sanity. It would not mean double capacity. However, going from 19 to 20 IT staff that last person would add heaps of more capacity.

Re:My old orkplace

[himself]

>
> IT staff: just me.
>
      "...and my old pal Johnnie Walker/And his brothers, Black and Red."

22 to 25 percent for us

[suck_burners_rice]

For a company of 16 to 18 people (it has been fluctuating in that range in recent months), we have four people whom you could consider some form of IT. This is not the typical definition of IT. We are a factory with lots of computerized equipment. Most of our time is split 50/50 between developing in-house software and programming the equipment for changeovers. The rest of the time (yes, I said 50/50, but that's 50/50 of most of the time; no math problem here) is spent keeping all of the company's computers and office equipment working properly. This involves anything from changing toner cartridges to specifying equipment purchases to reinstalling Windows for the trillionth time. Back to the issue of ratio, that's a whopping 25% of the company if we have 16 employees, and 22% of the company if we have 18 employees. I'd say it's many computer people for a company this small. But then again, computers are taking over so many roles that used to be performed by humans that more humans are needed to program and run the darn things.

Hmmm.... what's worse?

[Opportunist]

A 1:7 ratio between IT-people and salespeople in a Non-IT company, or a ration of 7:1 in an IT-company?

I'm not really sure. But I can vouch that the latter is really, really bad.

4 in 1000

[Anonymous Coward]

1000 mostly part-time employees to an IT staff of 4 people. It's the restaurant business. We don't really have any management that is actively involved with IT, so we tend to get things done quick.

I believe...

[Just Brew It!]

...that at the company where I work (privately held defense contractor), it is on the order of 20:1 or higher, but I really do not know for certain. I work at a small satellite R&D office; our situation is rather different than that of the company as a whole since we are entirely focused on R&D, whereas the home office has a significant manufacturing aspect as well.

We have no full-time IT staff in our office, but several of us deal with IT issues as a sideline (it probably represents about 10% of what I do in a typical work week, and a similar percentage of overall staff hours in our office). The home office is totally Windows-centric, whereas we (in our office) are running a mix of Windows and Linux infrastructure, with Linux playing an increasingly prominent role.

Nothing wrong with that.

[Mr. Ayo]

The ideal ratio is of employees to IT is 22:7

CAD Support

[pipingguy]

Coincidentally, I did a quick check yesterday and found a 53-1 ratio (i.e., 53 people in the building as "customers"), but that's dependent on whether a similarly-skilled friend is available to help out.

Most "customers" are very reasonable, but those that aren't, well...I'm not up to making it BOFH time.

[I decided to move into this role after almost 30 years as a designer and now I'm appreciating what admins have to deal with]

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[SuperQ]

That's why I love my job. In my group we have 1 manager for ~20 people (plus a few more in an EU timezone for off-hours oncall, but they have a local official manager). My manager handles 2 sub-groups that work on different projects. Each project has a technical (former sysadmin and former software engineer) PM that is also a 50% engineer. So really we have 2 FTE managers for 20 people. The 1:(10-15) manager to engineer ratio fairly common.

Two points

[JRHelgeson]

Can you name a single business function that isn't dependent upon Information Technology? We are the common thread that ties all business functions together.

My second point reflects the previous commenter - that this must be a highly regulated industry with numerous safeguards. This creates 2x the IT workforce for any job function such that the inadvertent activities of one worker does not compromise an entire system. Much like in the federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies - it takes at least two people to get one task done. This way one worker can't open up a firewall port to enable remote desktop/vnc/pcanywhere to a system - for the sake of convenience in getting a really important task done - and in doing so introduces a breach to the network by providing the conduit for infection (example based upon a real example). By having such divided responsibilities with checks and balances, if ONE person were able to accomplish this task, this prevents an uneducated user from making a mistake that causes a breach - they must prove they know enough to subvert the security system which in turn proves their intent to subvert the security system - and can therefore be terminated, demoted, or charged criminally with improper handling of classified information.

This is the very reason you do not hear about IT workers being brought up on spy charges.

My brother was laid off from one of the nations largest banks for this very reason. He oversaw the Oracle database that cleared ACH transactions and he also wrote the code that identified 'suspicious' purchases based upon previous card activity and brought the card up for review or suspension. He had full unfettered access to the database, including the logs. They replaced him with 3 people. Inefficient? Yes. Expensive? Yes. But much less expensive than had one co-worker discover his password, compromised his account and caused billions in losses from shipping account info overseas. They told him at the time he was laid off that they would welcome him back to the bank after 9 months, long enough to put different security measures in place and have him in a different, yet related position.. it was never that he personally was a threat, but you can see that he could possibly be a weak link in the chain.

He is now coding software document management components for the SIPRNET and working in a TS environment.

Re:Two points

[Free the Cowards]

Can you name a single business function that isn't dependent upon Information Technology? We are the common thread that ties all business functions together.

You could say the same thing about marketing, legal, finance, and management. And unlike IT, those can't say that businesses got along just fine without them for thousands of years before they were invented.

Re:Two points

[JRHelgeson]

I'm not saying that other departments are unimportant or non-essential. Simply that IT reaches deep into every department of an organization and if IT fails to do its job, everyone can suffer. Companies nowadays are equally run from the server room as they are the board room.

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[Anonymous Coward]

They do exactly what Bill Lumbergh does in the movie "office space."

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[AdamInParadise]

I worked with a US company were the ratio was 6:1. Yes, about 6 managers for 1 programmer (they had 3). They've been working on their (not so complicated) product for about 4 years, with no end in sight.

Mine seems pretty thin in comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

We're at something like 400:70000 or 1:175

It's really hard to make an accurate judgement

[liquiddark]

For example, at my current employer, we theoretically have 6 full-time programmers, 2 full time and 1 part time hardware guys, and a couple of co-ops in a company with 800 local people. However at the corporate level there's a whole other set of programmers, admins, and so on, and then there are application analysts in a couple of other departments.

Basically what I'm saying is, in a big enough organization (and big enough isn't really that big), the number of in IT isn't really an indicator of the number of working IT staff.

Wholesale Industry

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a Canadian sub of a global apparel company. In our country there are 3 IT Staff for 150 users. That's a 50:1 Ratio, and I'm not counting warehouse staff...
Globally there are about 5500 people with email addresses with 250 being IT staff for a ratio of ~20:1

Thanks /. I think it's time I tell the IT director we need a new body ;)

Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

At my company we employ zero IT staff (150 employees). I am the IT staff, but I am not employed as such. Considering that 95% of our work is "data-based"/"processing-based" I find it kind of crazy; but what can I do? We have an idiot in our admin building that makes these hugely overcomplicated Excel spreadsheets that *ugh* link to other spreadsheets that each have a million individual (ok, I am exaggerating) worksheets in them. This is our, supposed, IT guy. I do c/c++/sql hourly, but I am just a researcher and am not capable of writing these 1.2 million worksheet multi-tier spreadsheets. I'd do something more sane (like, hello, a database).

San Francisco System Admin

[ilovesymbian]

And the city of San Francisco had only *one* admin with the passwords? Maybe they should have had more to prevent the 8-day hijacking.

Depends on the company

[kisielk]

It really depends on the company and the user base. I've worked in a lot of different environments with a lot of different layouts.

I interned as a developer at a 35 person company in Japan that had 0 IT staff. It was full of developers with a few marketing and business people, and everyone was responsible for managing their own workstation. There were a few knowledgeable employees who helped others with computer problems, but no full-time staffers. E-mail / groupware was outsourced to a third party provider. There was no central authentication or anything of the sort. Surprisingly, the system worked pretty well, although some of the development practices were a bit outdated -- but that's really an orthogonal issue.

I worked at another company here in Vancouver with a similar setup. They had a totally heterogeneous computing environment, users generally manage their own machines (though the IT department provided a base software layout). They did however have a full time IT staff of 4 for 250 employees, and there was some degree of central auth, as well as stuff like databases and our own mail server. There was also a fairly large group of non-technical users, whose machines were completely handled by one of the IT staffers.

Another example, I worked as a contractor at another company here in Vancouver approximately 1200 employees in size. At one point we had 10 satellite offices, and 8 remote IT people, with another 15 full time at the main office here. Everything was large scale.. lots of Oracle databases, racks and racks of NetApps, tons of servers, Unix workstations, a full parallel Windows environment. Huge and complicated.

Currently I'm at a small company of just over 20 employees. However, we have 3 people who are full time "IT". This is to support our highly technical user base of scientists and in-house software developers, and we also have an 80-node compute cluster to run, as well a surprisingly elaborate array of services for the users. However, the need to have 3 staff is mostly because of the different roles to fill. One of us takes care of most of the desktop and user-facing things such as VPN, email, etc. The other two take care of running the simulation systems, maintaining the Unix environment, and working with the developers to develop the software for the cluster and vice-versa.

So as you can see, just in my experience, I can provide four vastly different examples. Every business is different. There's no one formula that can fit all environments. It really depends on your user base and business need.

Re:Depends on the company

[An dochasac]

What is interesting is watching how the IT support ratio changes with technology. I helped a bank move from Windows fat clients to Linux fat clients using central LDAP controlled configuration, remote installs and upgrades and watched their IT support ratio decrease by a factor of 20. Moving to thin client on big iron running Solaris/*nix and you could easily increase this by another factor of 10. I doubt my own company even has 1 IT support person per 1000 Sun Ray desktops.

Re:Depends on the company

[the_B0fh]

You forgot the word "competent" in there somewhere. Not saying that windows people are incompetent, but, here, let Microsoft speak for itself:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/21/ms_paper_touts_unix/
http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html

Merely depends on how HR defines it

[petes_PoV]

Different companies classify jobs as IT or not, depending on their policies. Ww might all agree that support staff count as IT workers, your place may have outsourced it's developers. Alternatively, there may be 5000 help-desk/telesales staff that get counted as "IT" (well, they work with IT, so that counts - doesn't it?).

The short answer is that there is no answer - although it is my experience that the more different departments there are in the IT organisation, the less efficient it is.

where I work we have 2 of 70 or 1/5th

[treeves]

of the ratio of the company in question ...and I'm not one of 'em. Specialty chemical company, so no reason to have a lot of IT staff.

Worst ratio I have done

[ZeroSerenity]

Working for ******* (Unnamed contracting firm), 5:1000. That's right, the ratio is 1:200. How we even lived through this sort of hell is interesting, not to mention most of us at the end of the day could only go home and pass out.

Re:Worst ratio I have done

[petes_PoV]

Not unreasonable - if everything just works.

In my experience, the biggest problem with IT systems is when something gets changed. If you can avoid changing things (i.e. getting them right at the design stage) there's very little for good IT staff to do.

25:1200

[AngryElmo]

1200 staff across 16 sites are supported by 25 IT people in my organisation. The majority of those are on the helpdesk. We have 6 back office (servers/network etc) staff, 2 administrative (including the CIO) and the remainder are either fully helpdesk or various degrees between helpdesk and technical.

When 25% time...

[deanston]

is spent on Project Management; 25% time on reports and meetings; 25% on keeping the old heterogeneous systems running with patches and glue code and refurbished parts; and 25% on research and testing to keep up with the ever faster evolving new software/hardware/licenses/versions, what IT staff has time to actually perform a system change?

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[Anonymous Coward]

At my last job we had 3:1. there was huge overhead and when i tried to explain why it hurts performance i was told it's like that because that's the way it has always been (and that it wasn't going to change so get used to it).

needless to say i didn't stop looking for a new job after i started there.

It depends in part on your definition of "IT"

[thatseattleguy]

What is IT? Does it include desktop PC installation and maintenance? Running the help desk? The guy who helps fix the copier when it's jammed? The guy who runs the network cables through the ceiling? The gal who programs the PBX and voicemail system? The group doing web design and website maintenance for the marketing department?

Different companies would regard all, some, or none of these as "IT" functions and all, some, or none the people who do them as "IT staff". So it depends in large part on your definition of "IT".

That being said, at my main client (a privately-held manufacturer with about 600 US employees and a couple hundred more overseas), there are only ten IT employees - meaning ALL of IT, including of the functions listed above. Plus two half-time consultants. Three employees do PC installation/maintenance/troubleshooting, one takes the help desk calls (and fixes the copiers/phones), five do programming, web, and database wrangling, and one is the manager (and also the network administrator). One of the part-time consultants does mail and system admin (me), and one does more web design. No other outsourcing, and most of the applications are home-grown custom jobs, so there's no large vendor support for anything. In all, it's about 11 FTEs.

This is a manufacturing company and like most of those that I've seen, they run a very lean operation. IT gets what it needs, but nothing more.

Now, a much more useful metric in my mind is "percentage of total company sales spent on IT". I think it's about 2% for this company (though again, definitions of "IT" are tricky). I've heard that 5% is a more typical number for most companies in the US, speaking across a broad range of industries. Anyone know a source for more concrete numbers?

Re:It depends in part on your definition of "IT"

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Now, a much more useful metric in my mind is "percentage of total company sales spent on IT". I think it's about 2% for this company (though again, definitions of "IT" are tricky). I've heard that 5% is a more typical number for most companies in the US, speaking across a broad range of industries. Anyone know a source for more concrete numbers?

I disagree. You can farm out your IT to some third world hell hole and bring your percentage WAY down, but you end up with variable quality issues, legacy issues, all kinds of problems - and if they're on the other side of the planet, you need to have a daily dev cycle that makes sense. The other problem comes in with testing. So, you could reduce it to some miniscule ratio, but result with mission critical failures.

The solution is quality and rational intelligent work.

RS

Re:It depends in part on your definition of "IT"

[atamido]

The guy who helps fix the copier when it's jammed? The guy who runs the network cables through the ceiling? The gal who programs the PBX and voicemail system?

Guys do copiers and cables, while gals do phones. I always wondered what the difference between guys and gals was, and now I know.

Around 50:1 at a large multinational

[mercurialmale]

Till 2004 I worked at a multinational company with ~22,000 employees of which ~450 were IT staff. But these numbers don't tell the whole story.
The company had offices in around 130 countries, many with only a small staff. There were a few local IT personnel in most countries (included in the 450). They did on-site troubleshooting, facilities and hardware installations, etc.
Most IT staff were in 4 locations around the world, providing follow-the-sun helpdesk support. We also had operations, application development/ support, management and strategy folks at these 4 locations. The company maintained a ton of internally developed business systems, including some written in COBOL way back when.
The company was (and is) almost entirely a Microsoft/ Windows environment. In the operations team, we did everything via AD and Group Policy using terminal services/ RDP. Really, it wasn't too painful.

Small Norwegian Municipality

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere around 1500 employees - 8 IT workers. Varies a little - when I started 6 years ago we were 4 - For a short while we were 11.

It works ok. :)

When IT is almost entirely outsourced

[Anonymous Coward]

In my current company, total staff=12000 and IT staff = 10 !
Almost all IT therefore is outsourced to several providers.
They have various platforms but implementing SAP at the moment.
Peter

transaction processing

[m0e]

My company does transaction processing (think prepaid and reloadable debit cards, gift cards, etc) and as such our business is heavily IT-related.

I think we have something along the lines of 600 staff -- of those about 100-150 of those are IT-related. This isn't including project managers or anyone else who interface with IT who don't do IT-related work on a regular basis. 1:5.5-6 ratio.

I think it breaks down to something like this (my numbers are probably way off, I haven't seen an org chart in forever):

IT Operations (non-management)
Server Infrastructure: 7
Network Infrastructure: 5
Application Support (all tiers, from internal apps to customer-facing apps): ~20
DBAs: 3
Data analyst types (information systems): 10
Global Architecture (the omniscient overlords who guide IT ops): 4
Helpdesk: 4
NOC: 10-12

Overall IT Software Development (coders/QA/etc): ~40ish

Management: ~12

I'm on the operations side so the count on the software side is all guessing. The rest of the employee makeup includes folks such as accounting, finance, sales, marketing, call centers, PMs, etc. Essentially the business breaks down into either folks who get the money to our doorstep, folks who make sure the money keeps flowing, and folks who make the systems that make the money flow.

The numbers can be misleading though... not only because such a ratio isn't the best quantifier -- for my company's business, a ratio of IT staff to others doesn't really tell you much other than that our business is heavily technology-oriented. For example, we have a high number of application support analysts compared to the rest of IT ops but the ratio of support analysts to business customers is something along the lines of 1:1-2000 depending on certain factors. The network group fields requests from both external business customers and internal staff so our support ratio is something like 1:75 (much lower than app support thanks to how different external customers interface with us). The sysadmins manage a ~650 system (physical/virtual/zoned) environment at the tune of about 1:90 overall... but that's not necessarily true since that group includes a couple of folks who work primarily on *NIX and another guy whose sole reason for living is to manage about 250TB of SAN storage. The DBAs... well I'm not even going to go there.

I think, in managerspeak, the phrase is, "the number you get depends on the metric you're trying to track." For my company, its size, and its structure, the ratio is pretty reasonable. We probably have far too many developers but most of that's somewhat due to the amount of concurrent projects rolling at any given moment along with the utterly insane complexity of some of the code they're writing and maintaining. As far as other industries... hard to tell. Depends on the technology needs of the company and/or the amount it is technology-driven.

My company

[initialE]

14 Developers, 4 Sysadmins, 4 support crew, 2 managers. Company of 3000 in 6 spread-out locations, not including 5 beyond our borders

5000 IT workers? Out of 35.000?

[blind biker]

I don't believe it. Maybe your friend was mistaken, but I believe this can't be.

Unless they are working in R&D, in which case they are not really IT, albeit their field of expertise may be IT. I worked for several years in R&D for a very large company in the field of mobile phones and mobile phone networks, and although my job looked like some kind of unix administration, it still was implementation/development. I wasn't in charge of a live infrastructure, I was configuring the storage OS services on our products' platforms.

Re:5000 IT workers? Out of 35.000?

[the_B0fh]

Why not? Even Microsoft publicly states that 5000 of their 55000 employees are strictly for internal support services.

Re:5000 IT workers? Out of 35.000?

[Onlyodin]

I guess it depends on whether your I.T. department runs on the imperial system or the metric system.

*wink*

The whole bigger than sum of it's parts

[geirnord]

As many are saying, there is no this as a correct ratio. However, I believe that the ratio is and should be different between large and small businesses.

The larger the business, more advanced IT features are (usually) required.

Example: A 50 user comany can manage with one IT guy full time. As this company getts bigger more applications and servers are introdused cause more spesialization to take place, requiering more people.

At some time availability becomes critical, and IT shifts changes from 6-18 hours to 24/7 requiering even more people. Even larger firms introduce the dreaded CIO and more beaurocracy, decreasing productivity and leading to the hireing of even more people.

At this point the IT departement can be considered a company in it's own right, providing services to the "host-company". And, as every one knows, a company gets more bloat and inefficiency as it grows...

1 in 7???

[alaffin]

Wow. 1 in 7.

I work at a medium sized company that (with recent acquisitions) has a staff probably close to eight or nine hundred spread out over offices in Florida, California, Pennsylvania, British Columbia Canada, Ontario Canada and London England. Our IT staff? Two in the head office in Ontario (my boss and myself), one in Pennsylvania, one in California, and a part time hire in Florida. And no outsourcing (well, sometimes in Vancouver or the UK, where we sometimes need help now rather than sending someone out by plane). So that's what? 4.5 in 800. 1 in 177.

We are, however, fortunate to have a reasonably competent staff - including a VP who was promoted out of our IT department and another who has run the show at other companies.

But 1 in 7? Me thinks she's including something different in that figure - people who are working in something IT related, but not directly maintaining the company infrastructure. We have a department geared toward propping up clients who lack effective IT support (with another three employees). Technically they're IT I suppose, but a fat lot of good they do in house when they're jetting off to god knows what part of the continent to set up/fix a client's network because our clients don't have anyone on their staff and refuse to contract a local company for it.

Mythic Man Month

[mbaGeek]

The ratio of "IT employees" to "non-IT employees" is a definition game.

The purpose of having anybody around (you know - "employees") is to help the "employer" accomplish the mission (hopefully there is a mission ...lol) - therefore ALL employees are in "customer" support (then we have to define the customer - yada,yada,yada)

Smaller organizations/departments are always more efficient. As more "employees" are added - more time has to be spent communicating between employees (i.e. more time is spent on activities that don't directly support the "mission").

Eventually you reach a point where adding additional employees is actually counter productive

"The Mythic Man Month" makes this point about software development but it is true in general...

Medium-sized tech company

[Lonewolf666]

Subsidiary of a larger company that deals in medical technology. Size around 100 people, mostly development, production and user training. Sales is done by a division of the larger company.

We have 5 permanent employees that do exclusively IT, two of those infrastructure, three software development for new products. Additionally, consultants in varying numbers.
At the moment, a new product with more than the usual software development need is going on, and I estimate the total number of IT related consultants (including offsite) at 15-20

9 to 350 - Local Government

[Anonymous Coward]

350 users
1 IT Manager
4 app dev
2 desktop tech
1 purchasing/desktop tech
1 help desk supervisor/tech
1 network admin

All Windows

How about IT Managers / overall employees?

[Tyrannicalposter]

How about IT Managers / overall employees or IT employees. Now that would be interesting.

Dumbest question ever?

[ydra2]

The ratio of IT workers to rest of company depends on the business. A corporate farm might have 1 or 2 IT workers and depending on season, 5 to 500 non-IT workers. A furniture factory might have 1 IT worker for every 1000 production employees. A food processing company might need a higher ratio because of the seasonal and perishable nature of the business. A shipping business would also need a robust IT staff to track its shipments and scheduling.

I'm quite sure that General Mills or Nestle corprations have large IT staffs in the hundreds, approaching thousands, but they have hundreds of thousands just working in the farms, factories, logistics, (people that manage physical stuff, like factories and storage), transport and shipping, and so on. For large corporations like that, the IT ratio is actually quite small because a lot of it is done by other smaller entities with little or no IT staff, like the independent farmer or rancher that does all his bookeeping the old fashioned way. on paper, except for bribes.

So the final answer is that some businesses, like server co-locating service require about 1-1 IT to non-IT and some, like low tech manufacturing require 0-infinity IT to non-IT ratio.

In other words, the question is meaningless.

betting company

[stalker314314]

Betting company in 4 countries - in central we have 1:3 ratio (~30 IT members), but overall, including our locals in those countries where employees type betting tickets, security, managers..., ratio is 1:50

So let's flame on...

[refactored]

....it's the nature of hierarchical systems like corporates that the _WORST_ companies, employing the WORST methods employ the most people because they are so inefficient that they need to get the job done.

And, depending on multiple factors like... how complete their monopoly is, how rich their niche is, how fat their investors pockets are, how crooked their pocket politicians are... they last a widely varying length of time. As they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Alas, since they set the methods for, the processes used by so many people, they get to all the conferences, write the papers, fill the text books.... with crap!

So which are the right methods? Which are the best tools?

Nobody actually has the foggiest.

Now. Let me really pour the flaming oil on...

And, no matter what Fred Brook's sacred book says, there really is a magic bullet for software development.

It's called doing software properly. From the top to the bottom. It's called relentless simplicity. It's called sound design. It's called proper UI design. It's called Quality beats Schedule.

Compared to the rest of the dump shoddy pack, yes, two orders of magnitude improvement are available.

Alas... nobody knows what it is.

Nobody even knows what "improve" is. The field is obscured by vapour, hype and gas created by the "biggest" and "BEST" companies.

Now let the trolls ROCK!

Re:So let's flame on...

[johannesg]

Alas... nobody knows what it is.

I don't have a complete answer for you, but somewhere in there, there must be something about "use competent people that actually give a damn". Don't just bring in warm bodies so that all the chairs are filled.

All of the other stuff (documentation standards, design methodology, programming methodology, choice of tools, choice of reporting method, working environment, etc.) can be varied greatly without much impact on the overal result. But competent people is the one thing you cannot do without.

I realize this will not go down very well with managers that prefer to think of programmers as interchangeable units, but this is the truth. Prove me wrong if you can...

Re:So let's flame on...

[jabithew]

And, no matter what Fred Brook's sacred book says, there really is a magic bullet for software development.

It's called doing software properly...

Translation: The best way to develop software well is to develop software well.

Yeah, probably. Most people could agree with that.

The rest of your post is pretty insightful though. Having lots of employees does not make a company good.

Re:So let's flame on...

[cjonslashdot]

Very insightful. I agree completely. One complication: large organizations have more complex requirements: they often have to deal with compliance issues, have more departments that they have to inter-operate with, and more legacy. Systems are larger and more complex, so integration is inherently more difficult. Systems tend to evolve as spaghetti because of the focus on this year's budget (cheapest always wins), and so legacy systems tend to be very, very hard to change. But these things withstanding, I agree completely with the poster ("refactored").

Re:So let's flame on...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like "Make software like apple!" ... which is good. Just don't make hardware like apple ;)

Re:So let's flame on...

[poopie]

"use competent people that actually give a damn". Don't just bring in warm bodies so that all the chairs are filled.

So true... a smart, skilled IT worker with a MASTERY of perl, shell, and UNIX fundamentals can be AT LEAST two orders of magnitude more impactful to the business than an "average" IT worker.

Re:So let's flame on...

[theonetruekeebler]

"Use competent people that actually give a damn". Don't just bring in warm bodies so that all the chairs are filled.

Very accurate. I would extend that by saying a manager's job is to

1. Help them be competent, and
2. Help them give a damn

Still, the original article was about a 35,000 employee company. In a firm that size, the presence of drones is inevitable.

I realize this will not go down very well with managers that prefer to think of programmers as interchangeable units, but this is the truth.

I could've sworn we were talking about IT, not programmers.

Re:So let's flame on...

[JWman]

And, no matter what Fred Brook's sacred book says, there really is a magic bullet for software development.

It's called doing software properly. From the top to the bottom. It's called relentless simplicity. It's called sound design. It's called proper UI design. It's called Quality beats Schedule.

Actually, that is precisely what Fred Brooks argued. By saying there is no silver bullet, he meant that there was no simple answer to improving software quality. And if you think your solution of "doing software properly" is a simple answer, we have radically different definitions of the word "simple".

From his paper:

"...though no technological breakthrough promises to give the sort of magical results with which we are so familiar in the hardware area, there is both an abundance of good work going on now, and the promise of steady, if unspectacular progress."

He then lists off several areas which he believed (back in 1986) would help to give us that increase in software productivity -- among which was good design. The difference is that he recognized it was going to be the combined effects of improving multiple areas (design, code reuse, etc.) that could give us an order of magnitude improvement.

That is in fact why his essay became "sacred", because in spite of making seemingly outrageous claims at the time, he's been vindicated over and over again.

Course this was posted early this morning and I'm only just catching up on my /. reading so this comment will likely go unnoticed...

Re:So let's flame on...

[atamido]

I can't tell you how much my knowledge of PERL and *nix has helped in managing our Exchange system... Errr...

Re:So let's flame on...

[kevinbrock]

....it's the nature of hierarchical systems like corporates that the _WORST_ companies, employing the WORST methods employ the most people because they are so inefficient that they need to get the job done.

Of course, sometimes company A employs 10 times the people of company B because it's *more* efficient, and doing 20 times the business. Got to look at the context.

Re:So let's flame on...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a place where we manage about 300-350 systems (Workstation, servers, etc) with only 3 people excluding the boss. Now we have a manager, which demands that we put tickets in for everything. This severely limits the amount of calls we used to perform in a day (all of us know more or less what our individual throughput was), vs actual. But the bosses dont care because they never bother to measure things until now. As for me I use to care deeply about uptime and such and keeping my people happy. Now, Im like put in a ticket and we get to it when we get to it. So yes you can do wonders with very few competent people, so long as you dont interfere with their workflow and you keep the morale/motivation of this staff high.

My 2 cents

Re:So let's flame on...

[Anonymous Coward]

what is competent exactly? seems like some serious eye-of-the-beholder stuff.

if you can't define it then that usually causes the "efficiency" problem that these ratios are symptomatically trying to treat.

Re:So let's flame on...

[ajlisows]

I think the "Use competent people that actually give a damn" is a HUGE thing to consider. I worked for awhile at a place that wasn't too large....450 users inside and outside. We had 19 people on the IT staff. Two of them were for internal web development. The rest were desktop support/server support. The Environment had five Novel Servers, four sun servers, and about 20 Windows Servers. It was incredible how much time some of the staff spent doing absolutely nothing. For the last two years, I have been working at a 90 Computer (Inside and Off-Site) manufacturing company that has.....just me! Actually, my boss who is the Engineering Manager will pick up some of the easier desktop support things to help me out so it's more like 1.15 IT workers or something. I have six windows servers and one Unix Server. We have rolled out several new solutions (Exchange 2007, Sharepoint, Knowledgelake Document management, Terminal Server, switched the ERP system over to SQL Server from Gupta), added three new servers, and replaced forty 5-7 year old desktops/laptops in the two years I have been there and I have developed four custom apps for in house. I'm currently working on an external web ordering system for them...but I believe we will have to outsource some of it because I can't get it all done. I work a LOT but it's very rewarding knowing that as long as a solution is going to be helpful AND not be extremely expensive.....the red tape associated with 20 IT workers in a small type company isn't going to stop my progress. I've been able to roll out more effective solutions alone in a 1:90 ratio than 20 of us had with a 1:20 at the previous job.

Re:So let's flame on...

[turbidostato]

"So yes you can do wonders with very few competent people, so long as you dont interfere with their workflow and you keep the morale/motivation of this staff high."

And you can support your subjective view with... Oh, yes, with nothing. Remember that what you can't support with numbers is not fact, just opinion.

Numbers (like your tickets) are paramount: without them you can't tell you are going on the right path but due to your (sometimes wrong) feelings based on your (always biased) opinion. Even more than that: without the numbers your manager won't be able to defend your jobpost when someone higher up the ranks see your department as the new goal to cut expenditures.

Re:So let's flame on...

[Anonymous Coward]

And, no matter what Fred Brook's sacred book says, there really is a magic bullet for software development.

It's called doing software properly.

Zoe? Gethin? Is that you?

Re:So let's flame on...

[ReedYoung]

The rest of your post is pretty insightful though.

I disagree. At first glance, I thought he opened with a strong point, but as I re-read, I think he blames the people for what in fact is an artifact of scale.
refactored:

....it's the nature of hierarchical systems like corporates that the _WORST_ companies, employing the WORST methods employ the most people because they are so inefficient that they need to get the job done.

On the contrary, I think the largest corporations have larger proportional workforces because scale increases the difficulty of anybody overseeing the whole operation. As a result, larger numbers of middle managers with overlapping knowledge are employed, giving the appearance that none of them can do their own jobs without assistance. In fact, it's the same redundancy principle that is the fundamental genius of the Internet's design.
refactored:

And, depending on multiple factors like... how complete their monopoly is[1], how rich their niche is[2], how fat their investors pockets are[3], how crooked their pocket politicians are...[4] they last a widely varying length of time. As they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.[5]

4 points awarded for truth, and 1 for style.

Having lots of employees does not make a company good.

You're right of course, but that is the central thesis of Fred Brooks' book, The Mythical Man-Month, which refactored sarcastically calls a "sacred book" and disputes about a "magic bullet." The insightful comment you offered in your attempt to support refactored contradicts your statement that the rest of r's post "is pretty insightful."
PS To anybody about to undertake their first management role in software development, I highly recommend this book, for its style and its insights into when more workers can help meet a deadline, and in turn how to provide well-reasoned estimates of completion time.

Re:So let's flame on...

[ReedYoung]

I could've sworn we were talking about mammals, not dolphins.

I could've sworn we were talking about IT, not programmers.

Programmers are IT.

Re:So let's flame on...

[ReedYoung]

I work a LOT but it's very rewarding knowing that as long as a solution is going to be helpful AND not be extremely expensive.....the red tape associated with 20 IT workers in a small type company isn't going to stop my progress. I've been able to roll out more effective solutions alone in a 1:90 ratio than 20 of us had with a 1:20 at the previous job.

That's also consistent with what Frederick P. Brooks' "sacred book" says about partitionability of tasks: some are more partitionable than others.

about 3% IT staff

[nr1]

Multi-billion $ Professional Service corp with high focus on IT related services and consulting.

180.000 staff overall in about 140 offices globally. At least 2/3 of staff are mobile at client sites 90+% of their time. Most have full admin access to their own machine.

Internal IT service organisation has about 5000 stuff (1:36, about 3%)

Mostly Microsoft shop with WinXP workstations (Vista rollout in progress) and Win2003/2008 servers.

Quick facts from 2007 (company grows by several 10k people each year):

Hardware
146,000 laptops deployed
4,737 devices monitored
6,700 servers managed
4,100 megabytes network bandwidth managed

Websites
10,000 unique visitors to Intranet Portal per day
24,000 unique visitors to external website per day
5,000 unique visitors use the âoeFindâ feature each day

Applications
280 global applications supported
496 local applications supported
1 global instance of SAP R/3, SAP Business Intelligence (BI), SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) (running on Win2003)
40,000 named SAP users between SAP R/3, SAP BI and SAP CRM
Database Size: SAP R/3 = 2.3 terabytes, SAP BI = 2 terabytes

e-mail
149,000 e-mail accounts
6,100,000 e-mail messages per day
125 kilobytes is average message size
8,600 Microsoft SharePoint sites
4,100 BlackBerry devices
21,000,000 conference call minutes per month

Support
1,007,000 resolved incidents per year through help desk, eSupport, Web chat and local support

I work in client facing Tech Consulting, so not part of the internal IT, however, I am very satisfied with their services.

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[Xemu]

The 1:(10-15) manager to engineer ratio fairly common.

For a geek manager, managing 10-15 people is a good ratio because you will have time to talk with each employee on a regular basis. If you manage 40 people there aren't enough hours in a day to talk to them all. Typically management:worker ratios of 1:40 works fine in a factory floor environment where you give more orders and have less involved workers.

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[YttriumOxide]

As I posted above, I'm not really sure about our "IT Department", but in my department, there's 1 real programmer ("guy who writes code" - that's me), around 7 high-skilled technical people that aren't programmers (range of skills from dealing with print data streams (PCL intepreter in his brain etc), document management systems experts, print workflow experts, colour theory experts etc), a couple of "project manager" / "financial" types who both have pretty good technical skills, and one manager (who used to be an ASIC designer/programmer). We're also in the process of looking for another programmer type. So, you could say it's a ratio of 3 non-technical to 8 technical by job definition, or 0 non-technical to 11 technical by skill-set (or 10 non-programmers to 1 programmer if you want to look at it that way, but we're not really a "development" department, so that wouldn't be fair!).

Our IT staff

[eglass1]

We have 16,000 employees and Nick Burns, our company's Computer Guy.

Transactional vs Tacit companies

[Corbets]

It's really impossible to define a ratio that works for all companies. I was listening to a McKinsey podcast yesterday where they mention that transactional companies tend to use IT to replace workers and thus have higher IT costs (and support), whereas tacit companies (knowledge workers and such) tend to use IT to supplement employees, thus have smaller infrastructures, lower costs and fewer support personnel.

75-1

[mellestad]

This is sort of a silly question, because it can be very different depending on what the company does, what the atmosphere is like, and how much money. We have two IT people. Our company has one main office and two remote sites, with a total of about 150 people. We probably only have 110 computers though. But we have SQL servers, accounting software, SharePoint, remote access, and all the various other projects that come up. The awkward part of being in a company that size is there is no room for specialists, the two of us need to be competent in every aspect of our IT infrastructure, unless we want to spend a bundle on outside help. That is what makes it interesting though :)

Somewhere between 1:30 and 1:60

[dastrike]

ISV, 30 employees, one-half IT technician. So a ratio somewhere between 1:30 and 1:60 might be reasonable to say.

How many do you need?

[dbIII]

One to do the work.

One to move printers around as part of departmental turf wars (petty but happens).

One to move computers from desk to desk as people get reassigned as part of departmental turf wars.

One to do busy work for a department that is jealous that real work is being done for another department. In extreme cases the amount of billable time per department is expected to be equal so you might need a few more.

One to fill the photocopier with paper for the user that is screaming red faced about how IT is useless and nothing ever works.

One to run the scanner for the receptionist that is too lazy to do so and pretends they do not understand it. They will have full backing from somebody with the power to fire the head of the IT department.

One, named Sven, to visit the ugly bored gradmas that make up fake emergencies just to get attention.

One to check the spam trap for all the "check is in the mail" type emails that were never actually sent.

One to stand outside the server room door to keep out those that decide that because the computers are all down the IT staff have time to work on their home computer for free.

Even a small company that really only needs one IT person for technical work needs more people depending upon how disfunctional the organisation is. In practice you just have a lot of angry people and a few IT workers that have to determine priorities based on how likely it is that they will be fired.

That is how some places can have well run IT with very few people and others will need more even if it is exactly the same IT people.

Re:How many do you need?

[Onlyodin]

That's spot on I reckon, except we couldn't get a Sven so we had to settle for a Sebastian from somewhere on the other side of the globe. Works for us!

3:18

[Anonymous Coward]

Working in an IT company here.
Software developers: 3
System administrators: 1
Marketing: 10
Sales: 3
Managers: 2
Accounting: 2
So that would be one seventh of the staff works in IT while the rest are for other things. Amazingly, we're doing just fine! Our applications are okay, we perform cross-testing, the sysadmin does almost nothing all day so whenever you need something he's always available... What we actually need is to hire two more people in the sales dept. We're talking about an IT company here!
I can't even decide what these numbers mean but I know our company is doing great and we release two to five new products every year.

What is an overall employee anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

[insert body text here]

Companies I know

[OpenSourced]

Company 1, is basically a big production plant with supporting back office. About 350 employees, about 50 back office, 1 IT. The IT is sub-contracted, and only works as sysop, no idea of info flow in the company. They work with a solve-it-all CRM from Unit 4 that fails to solve all, as it's generally the case. I work there doing some programming, but there is really _nobody_ that is the IT voice there. It is of course a mess, but they get by, paying by their nose to the Unit 4 subsidiary, but perhaps it would be less than having an IT contact person, who knows. It's a pain to work for them because nobody really knows what's going on, and I have to sort things out by myself.

Company 2, another similar company I work with is a bit bigger, though not much, perhaps 500 people, divided in 5 plants. They have two IT people, both do sysop and analysis, they never write a line. Lines are written by a local company (and myself of course). It's a rather better environment, IT-wise. You have a contact person, but usually you have to work the problems at the user level.

Company 3, similar environment to the second one, also 5 plants, about 500 people. They have 6 IT, including an IT manager. They do all development in-house. The IT is much more controlled, but the IT staff is usually overworked. Projects can take 6 months to get started from the moment they are needed. So they sometimes sub-contract, but the IT people is reluctant to do so, as they would be required to maintain that code if the data structures changed. And they change data structures as needed.

So my take on this is that there are different ways of doing things IT-wise, and it's difficult to know which one is better. I wouldn't advise Company 1 take, but between Company 2 and 3 it's difficult to decide. For Company 2, the vision of the software (for the IT people) is like a black box. It does this and this, and I don't care more. Sometimes they have to sort out things between sub-contractors (changes to the database structure by one of them can crash programs of another one), but they don't really have any responsibility on the code running, it's always a sub-contractor thing, and they are the interface. They are of course limited in flexibility, and speed of action.

Company 3 is more like the linux kernel :-) They control the whole code base there, so they can do really anything with it. But you lose on your ability to sub-contract (think hardware drivers in the linux kernel analogy), as you need to control the output of the sub-contractor, and integrate it in your controlled code base. Also they need 3 times more staff for it, and you have to keep them saturated, because if not, you are wasting resources. So there is always a lag of implementation, and also many possibly effective things never get done.

I'm glad you asked :P

[Thorwak]

The company I work for (home electronics retail chain with stores in three countries) has centralized IT, including the support. We are about 1000 employees in total.

The core IT staff is 7 people :P Add some web guys (who work 100% with running our web site/shop + intranet) and a couple of project managers + one local IT support guy in one of the other countries and the figure would be around 15 people.

Usually, when I tell people how few we are they think we have everything outsourced. This is not the case however. We actually do almost everything inhouse, including continuous development in our own UNIX based business system for the stores. This was bought maybe 20 years ago and has been modified inhouse ever since. Telnet based cash registers FTW :) This may seem insane, but it works pretty well actually. Instead of minor changes taking weeks or months if external consultants were to do it (because of all the "analysis" and stuff that would go into the "project"), we can do it in hours or minutes when the higher management in their infinite wisdom decide that some new customer bonus system or what not needs to be implemented country-wide this afternoon, for instance.

We have consultants do development work in the accounting system though (.NET...). We also sometimes buy very specialized services like installation of a clustered Oracle system. The goal is always to do stuff ourselves (to keep the knowledge of our own systems within the organization) and get help when learning something for a one-time installation doesn't make sense and yet wanting best practice followed.

Sometimes when I think about how 6 or 7 of us actually run a pretty damn successful infrastructure including about 80 servers (Windows, Linux, HP-UX) (most of them under ESX, thank god), IP telephony company-wide, VMWare cluster, 700+ PCs and numerous applications I feel proud. May sound like bragging perhaps, but it's more the feeling of being part of a really functioning IT department (and, OK, noting that we have great uptime, few problems and taking professional pride in that)

Other times, it feels insane. And it can be insane sometimes. Like when two or three of us get ill and have to stay home at the same time. And we are of course vulnerable in a way if a couple of us suddenly would resign without any notice. Personally I would like to 2-3 more people for that reason alone)

I don't feel worried being fire anytime soon at least :) It would take a year to replace any one of us, even though we are fairly good at documenting stuff. Even perfect documentation only takes you so far though, as I think most people here would agree on. And believe it or not, 5 of us has been working here for 8 years or more. I'd say that's a pretty good sign things are working out for both us (the IT staff) as well as the company.

And yes, we do get normal vacations (4-5 weeks) and don't have to be on call all the time. We have a rotating on-call schedule. I have it this week, Monday-Sunday. So far I have had ONE call in 6 days...

With the right people it doesn't have to be a 1:10 ratio. But of course there are days when the phone just never stops ringing, and those days I curse that we are so few...

1:42

[snikulin]

Duh!

hps group

[Anonymous Coward]

We have 100 users on laptops and desktops and 20/30 on macs, we only outsource the mac stuff all the rest is done by me.

So a ratio of 100 to 1 here.

When the system works and you keep it running its fine, just need to keep on top of things and make sure users know that if they break it it takes longer to repair if its the equiment or setup fault it will be fixed asap

1 : 30

[Anonymous Coward]

Current ratio is 1 to thirty. I'm the one. Its a web development shop. Mostly windows, some OpenBSD. Approx 45 servers, not including virtual guests and testing systems. Trying to change the ratio to 1:15 at the moment. It'll settle at 1:20 which is about where I like it.

Google answer on it

[slateslate]

It seems other people are also interested in finding out the magical staffing ratio. There are studies written for that. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/784840.html

It depends

[Anonymous Coward]

If you outsource with IBM Global Services, the number of "IT people" onsite will skyrocket, but overall productivity will plummet. IBM charges for each person onsite, and always seems to have more managers onsite than people doing real work. The sheer amount of bloat in their organization is amazing, and what's more amazing is that every time they cut staffing at a customer site, it's never managers, it's always technical staff.

that's way too many emails

[petes_PoV]

149,000 e-mail accounts
6,100,000 e-mail messages per day

That's over 40 emails per person per day. I've got to assume that most of them are "internal spam" (i.e. merely CC's for CYA reasons). If you have to take action on more than 2 or 3 each day, there's something wrong with your organisation structure.

Re:that's way too many emails

[ralphdaugherty]

149,000 e-mail accounts
6,100,000 e-mail messages per day

That's over 40 emails per person per day. I've got to assume that most of them are "internal spam"...

      That's probably a bad assumption. They would count incoming spam they have to deal with, wouldn't they? That's where the large numbers per employee would come from.

  rd

Hmmm, a guess

[Lost Penguin]

"35,000 employees, over 5,000 IT employees"
A totally Microsoft Vista shop?

120:1

[speighd]

And that includes PC & network support (manufacturing company). My guess is the 1:7 company runs mainframes. We run UNIX....

Government

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what a good ratio is, but I worked at several government agencies where a solid 25% of the staff worked in IT. NONE of these agencies were "IT Agencies."

Military net

[steelcobra]

At my last unit we had about ~800 users in our net with one GSA civ and one contractor, along with 6 25B's (Information Technology specialist MOS[military job]) for support. So it was about 100:1 on a Cisco/MS 2K3 server/XP Pro environment and it ran smoothly with little problems with overload or red tape.

Cost or Profit

[QuestorTapes]

If the IT employees are all costs to the company, such as support, it seems high.

However, some or most of the IT employees, especially the consultants, could be direct dependencies of profit making operations.

Maybe not in the sense of sales and manufacturing of software or electronics; but what about sales of services enabled by this IT staff? Maybe directly attached to external applications that generate a lot of business?

Of course there are differences by industry...

[subreality]

If you're in a software shop, you'll have a lot of IT people to support a large number of people whose job revolves around computers.

If it's a restaurant chain, probably not so many.

If you're running a retail web site, a stock exchange, a telephone company, or anything where you bleed money fast when the computers are unhappy, you'll probably have some extra IT guys around to tend to them.

If you're a law firm and you're using the computers for secretaries to type up memos, it's not as big a deal.

The ratio also turns more IT-heavy as a company gets larger, because the systems get more complicated. A company with ten employees just needs desktops. A company with a hundred needs a few servers. A company with ten thousand can have some incredibly sophisticated infrastructure.

What is reasonable? Take the number of computers you have, and multiply by the rate that you lose money if they aren't working. That'll let you estimate the scale pretty well, excluding management overhead as the company gets bigger.

8:300 - 10:300

[Anonymous Coward]

4 for the desktops, 4 for the systems and datacenter in 3 timezones, two continents.
That's people who do actually work.
I'd say that a 1:30 ratio is ideal, eg with one more desktop and one more system support we'd be smooth and could absorb sickness/vacation/crisis.

1:150

[bjackson1]

I work for a very large consulting firm >150,000 employees worldwide, and we have around 1,000 permanent IT workers. The nice thing about working in technology consulting is that for large internal initiatives we can "hire" our own consultants to work on our initiatives. With that in mind it's hard to quantify the exact number of workers in the IT department, but I'm actually surprised about how efficient the IT department runs.

BTW, we are mostly a Microsoft shop, with some Oracle and SAP, and I'm sure you can figure out what company I work for, and thus criticize me for it.

It Depends on the Company and their Structures

[sasha328]

I worked for HP Services for quite a number of years in the Asia Pacific region. I was one of the "outsourced" guys. For one customer where HP was the full outsource partner, there were around 200 IT staff for a company of around 8000 staff. This included, server, sales, desktop and managerial support (but not security, which was in house of about 20 people). There was another measure within the IT Department (or HP in this case) of how many "support" staff per field/development/support/actual IT staff. For this particular customer, the ratio was about 1 to 7. That is 1 non-IT-handson or admin person for every 7 IT hands on person. This customer was also always in the green (meet SLAs consistently) in the whole AP region.
This was the gold standard where other customers were measure against.
Within the IT outsource environment, the 1 to 7 ratio was never beat, and one of the worst performers was almost 1 to 1. Their SLAs were not as good either.

The point I'm trying to make, is that, there also needs to be proper management within IT departments, not just the company as a whole.

will the real IT stand out.

[Anonymous Coward]

First you need to defined what "IT" is. It varies from company to company.

We have about 12000 employees and about 1000 people in what we call the IT department, so one would say 12:1 ratio, but when you break it down to real world. you have 12 system admins managing over 3000 servers spread out over a 5 state area, 50 admins with over 9000 desktops and 300 developers actually doing code. 6 people in the DBA group, 8 in the web/app server/MQ group, 10 or so in the monitoring group, Now dont forget the data/voice , architecture, planning, ,,audit, compliance, a few in risk management, secretary, , and way to many managers.

So what is the real radio of IT to employee's. Is it the 12:1 using the 1000 empoyee's or it is 40:1 using just the coders?

Also simple changes get more and more complex the larger the group. a simple database change could affect many groups/project down stream. A simple web page change could ripple down into an ORG.

How Many?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just left (in May) a company with 800 staff, 5 locations and a grand total of:

1 IT Person..My boss with the 'Inventory Manager' (who also just left), and we had a 'JD Edwards/Report Writer/System Analyst, but he didn't know the difference between a server and a workstation.

When I left, they had 0 IT people..and weren't planning to hire because of poor financials..I had been replacing dead p-4's with p-3's they had. Imagine giving a LOWER performance machine to an employee. OH..and BTW..this company happens to build hardware for the DOD..

Bureaucracy.

[miffo.swe]

Some companies have little to none bureaucracy while some make it take months to get a simple account. I think some people use policys, rules and red tape to put a blanket to alterations and new installations. The reasoning might be that the less you change the less people you need. In reality the shops that works best is the ones who bend the rules and dont think so much. Being practical and to do what it takes goes a long way. If some arcane policy makes you do a insecure and cumbersume setup its better to just break that rule than to spend months trying to get it changed.

Its also important very important for management to draw a clear line between whats support and what the users are supposed to do themselves. I have seen many people who leech on support just because they can get away with it. The user is supposed to know how to use the software in a daily basis except perhaps installation and some customization. Support isnt supposed to do the users part of the work in using the software. It is supposed to fill their needs, not their whims or desires.

My ratio

[bwindle2]

I work for a company which manufactures medical devices. 650 employees; 20 in IT (14 programmers/validation people writing custom software and validation; 6 doing servers/switches/etc). All Windows, MSSQL, Exchange.

Innovation and development vs. production

[dstates]

Recognizing the difficulty in defining IT in the first place, does anyone have estimates as to the fraction of IT staff involved in innovation and development? I work in a large health care system with a large (600+) IT staff but completely lacking in plans to innovate and develop new approaches. To argue that this is crazy and short sighted, it would be useful to have data from other IT organizations.

Project Athena at MIT

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Check out this article from the IBM Systems Journal about the work done at MIT on Project Athena and the model they developed for calculating the number of required IT staff based on the number of workstations, users, applications, licenses, etc.

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[dpilot]

The thing to remember is that "Project managers generate revenue," while "(real) workers are a cost." It's the goal of every company to maximize revenue while minimizing cost.

So of course if you can wrap your head around that kind of thinking, you'd expect the results you see.

The obvious flaw in this reasoning is recognizing that project managers are responsible for revenue, they don't generate it. The second flaw is simply the nearly universal lack of recognition for people with real skill who do real work.

You're one when ...

[BitterOldGUy]

Which brings me over to the question "what is an IT person?"

You're one when your pay comes out of the IT department's budget - even if you sweep floors. Get paid out of the finance budget and then your in Finance.

Outsourced individuals should be counted

[howardd21]

If you are trying to arrive at an employee:employee ratio, I guess most here could be strictly correct. But that does not take into account the real world methodologies of engaging support personnel, or of understanding the people they support. Two sides exist:
* People in the line of business (non-IT) being supported may be employees, contractors, or vendors (if there for longer periods of time). They all need the same support: a system, access, security oversight, help desk, app support, etc.)
* People in the IT support function, which may be employees, consultants (Self managed), contracted workforce (managed by the company), or outsourced firms for an entire function. They all make up the IT support function. And "headcount" is not as relevant in this scenario, if we engage IBM for an outsourced help desk, I do not count all the employees of IBM. I am really buying a block of time at some level or another.

Which brings me to my main point: organizations need to find the best mix of employees and external engaged resources. They should measure this in the organizational currency (e.g. $), not headcount. I realize that the CIO, or IT support manager needs some headcount type numbers to know when to hire or engage, but they should be thinking about the best, most economical way to provide this that fits the long term strategic direction of the organization.

But to directly address the question in terms of headcount, I have seen a usual ratio of between 1:40 (average), but as high as 1:80 or so. The difference is usually based on industry, or more specifically the IT intensity of the budget. Industries that process information have a higher percentage of budget in IT, and a corresponding higher ratio of IT headcount to organization size. Industries with low IT intensity (manufacturing, government) tend to have a lower ratio.

In the oldest profession...

[n9hmg]

That is - the provision of meat (what do you think the first hookers were paid in?), our company has ~220k employees, of which roughly 8000 are administrative - sales, marketing, managers, HR, executives, etc., and down in that "etc." you'll find roughly 50 people developing, maintaining, and administering custom software, a massive SAP deployment, PeopleSoft, 300-ish windows servers, 100-ish unix servers, 4 AS400 LPARs, and a worldwide network infrastructure.

And yes, I AM a couple years behind on AIX patches... only one year on the 30 HP-UX we deployed last year. Thank goodness we outsource our 3 internet-facing systems.

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[John Hasler]

> The thing to remember is that "Project managers generate revenue," while "(real) workers
> are a cost." It's the goal of every company to maximize revenue while minimizing cost.

So promote everyone to project manager and make billions.

In the school systems insanity runs supreme.....

[rimcrazy]

At my wifes school system they don't count the ratio of people to IT but more systems. All systems combined, desktops, laptops, Dana's, etc they have over 20K systems. They have 4 full time IT staff people. Do the math. Needless to say......nothing but fires get put out.

1:100

[markdavis]

Long-term care healthcare facility, 95% Linux, thin clients, 296 beds, 400 total employees, 160 users, 4 total in IT. That is 1:100 per total employees or 1:40 per total users. IT includes computers, network, phones, voicemail, printers, faxes, copiers, company newsletter, signs, training, sys admin, backup, network, hardware troubleshooting/setup/repair, but IT worker count does not include 3 phone operators. No consultants, no outsourcing.

I am sure we are far from "typical".

Ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

60-70 IT staff to approx 1400 computers, basic office and 95% Windows Environment, hardware has been outsourced.

1 to 50

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in Public Radio, and I'm the only IT person for a company with around 50 employees. We do use a contractors some. We have a mix of Linux and Windows servers, with mostly XP desktops.

1 to 300 ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

My current ratio is 1 IT person (me) to around 300 employees...So that's a 1 to 300 ratio?

1 to 7 -- try 1 to 75

[Hutz]

I'm IT director at a school which runs K-12. We have a one-to-one laptop program in the high school, so we have about 350 laptops in the high school. All tolled we have about 200 faculty and staff, about 850 user accounts, and an additional 125 computers around the other buildings (staff computers, labs, mobile labs, etc). We support all that with 6 full-time staff including myself. We have 1 database consultant that we use for about 100 hours per year. We fix Dell, HP, and Apple laptops in house. Personally, I think our ratio is a little low, but I really only would like one or two more staff total.

Skeleton crew here

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a state natural resources division with 700 employees and 3 IT professionals. I am also considered IT, that is, I report to the IT manager, but I'm the coordinator of a specialized IT-related technology and thus don't do desktop support, networking, or server maintenance myself.

We have between 10 and 15 district offices, over 80 county offices, and over 10 assorted field offices. None of these offices has its own IT employee; almost all of the "day to day" activities are maintained by the "business" employees with the support of the 3 central office IT staff.

Our OS environment is Windows XP Pro SP 3 with Novell file servers.

Needless to say, it can be a mess at times.

50 to 1 IT guys

[syn1kk]

My job has about 100 some odd people with 2 IT people. That is like 50 to 1.

We are a lean mean ... IT... fight... ing... machine.

My experiences so far...

[rAiNsT0rm]

Maybe I just have really bad luck but this has been my breakdown so far:

Bank - 2 IT VS. 300 Staff at 14 locations
ISP - 3 IT vs. 2200 customers (IT even did billing and mailing and support)
University - 3 Network staff vs. 10,000+ ports and data center/supercomputing (probably 75 IT total but other departments)

So, yeah, my whole life I've been overworked and underpaid. That's the IT way! What a great life choice I made.

It's Called "Lean Manufacturing"

[jvin248]

I do a bit of consulting in this area - take a look at Lean Manufacturing. Most companies think it's only for the shop floor, but it really applies to the "Paperwork" processes that mostly hinge on the IT infrastructure. In the beginning code tries to duplicate paper forms and work flow but soon the code begins to define the work process.

Cleaning up the electronic work forms (and reducing the data required to fill out forms - simple as having to put in both State _&_ Zip Code to complex like requiring filling out 15 data fields when only 2 ever get used by the database miners) saves the company lots of wasted time, effort, and cost. Also issues with a lack of error proofing feedback causes waste - users don't know what isn't right and why the system throws them an error.

Big companies have ability to absorb waste in work processes for quite a while, until the economy tips over and then they shed people by the thousands.

It's easy to fix - but the steps need to be taken.

John
Discretionary Thoughts

Government Ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

At our local county government, we have 15 IT employees for about 1000+ employees.
2 infastructure, 2 systems, 1 analyst, 3 techs, 1 web guy, 1 programmer, 3 systems specialist, 1 voice / phone person, 1 administrative/helpdesk.

Currently we consider ourselves understaffed for the work, and often have contractors help us with work that we can't get to.

It's an old question

[gznork26]

Call me an old fart, but at my first IT job -- in the early 70s -- we got a new hire, a programmer who had previously worked at a regional brewery. He told a story about a formal visit they'd gotten from a larger brewery that was astounded by the small size of his company's IT budget, and wanted to know how they did it. Our new hire had been their entire programming staff.

Wall St.

[pyite]

I work on Wall St. About 1/4 of the firm is IT workers. That's thousands. And it doesn't account for people who code in other capacities, though that number is smaller.

simple answer

[DragonTHC]

your friend's corporation is run by incompetents.

she must not realize that.

The whole corp must be those people from the idiocracy movie.

Seriously, if you need that many people to do IT work, someone in charge in incompetent.

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[Anonymous Coward]

I know where your coming from its soul destroying.

I'm working for an EU company and the ratio is similar. I've been working on a project for 18 months now, and similar projects at previous jobs have only taken 6-8 weeks.

I'm working out my notice period now, and the managers still can't wrap their heads round why I'm leaving. hohum...

Understaffed

[macmaniac]

The educational institution that I work for has an IT staff of 5 to support a faculty/staff of 500 and about 3,000 students. Counting auxiliary IT bits (web folks, information systems and other non-support IT roles), we have a total of 10.

Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI Compliance

[Vandil X]

I'm a 12-year veteran of IT support and systems administration. I worked in a college campus that had several tiers of IT staff, one for each "school" within the campus, and then a mail group for generic stuff. Each "school" would have about 5-10 IT staff and 3-4 managers. As long as something cost less than $500, much of it was cake and didn't require a commitee.

I also worked at a newspaper with 200 employees where I was the only IT person. Being alone and on-call for systems and user issues in a 24/7 newspaper operation was the pits.



A few things I have observed with places I've worked or have friends at are:

After the Enron fiasco and the resulting Sarbanes-Oxley "controls" and documentation, many IT departments balooned to include "IT" people who had to bookkeep all the software licenses, print logs, and fill out paperwork and not do any actual IT support or administration at all. Keeping all that crap tracked was enough of a full-time job.

Business that charge credit cards get a double-dose of it, having to hire staff to make them PCI compliant and maintain the databases, etc. for any new PCI "controls" that get invented each year as well as checking user desktops for post-it notes with client credit card info.

Re:Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI Compliance

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I was at amazon during the SOX implementation; we honestly didn't have that bad a time of it, largely due to us being paranoid about losing CC info already.

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[dpilot]

Sounds like a business plan to me, one that any contemporary CEO would certainly buy into.

Some ratios of places I've worked

[kilodelta]

Let's see.

275 employees, 4 IT people. 68.75:1 Salary mid 5 digits.

60 employee, 7 IT people. 8.57:1 Salary high 5 digits

Currently 12 employees, 3 IT people 4:1 Salary low six figure.

So I can see that in my I.T career the money has gone higher while the ratio has gone down. I must be doing something right.

Microsoft Professional IT ex-burger flippers

[Ticklemonster]

This ought to really get some IT folks up in arms, but from what I see, you have the vast majority of businesses led by people who don't know what is going on, and they put their trust in the voodoo witch doctor like talents of their IT people who in turn just flat run rampant and do whatever they want. A large portion of these people don't know their ascii from a hole in the ground, but know enough to pass the Microsoft exams to become full fledged geniuses, and they go out and cause more trouble. One of our guys is notorious for leaving after fixing stuff, and when you sit down, nothing he fixed works. New computer with all your old stuff on it? Yep, there it is, sitting on your desktop. A full inventory of the system shows everything in order, but nothing works except (you guessed it) Microsoft stuff. Even then, the printer either refuses to print at all, or sends its job to some networked printer somewhere in another office. This has its perks, though. You can really have fun printing stuff on other people's printers :)
I have gotten to where I refuse to do even the simplest of things in my office because the IT guys make over twice what I do, and I used to fix their problems in no time flat. My problem is, I won't pay for that "genius testimonial" that the IT guys paid for. Nor do I care to enter the IT field regardless of the pay potential. It's like joining the Nazi party if you ask me. Yeah, I can pull a trigger, but not for the ideology that those people have. If it's Microsoft oriented, I'm against it. And Microsoft has a firm lock on our company because (you guessed it) our IT department is drunk on the drink from the cup from Redmond. ... meaning, mention linux and they have a hissy fit.

I'm pretty sure I work at the company in question

[Anonymous Coward]

..or at least I work at a Fortune 100 company with ~35,000 employees including ~5,000 in the IT organization. As some eluded to, it really depends on what you call an "IT person". We have many people with titles like "process analyst" or "business analyst" that could be aligned to non-IT business units at other companies.

We also have a large potion of marketing aligned to the IT organization to streamline delivery of web marketing initiatives. I have literally reported to marketing people with no technology background that were part of the IT organization. You can argue that it's screwed-up but there are advantages to mashing these groups together. There's a lot less conflict between the "computer guys" and the "marketing guys" when they're all on the same team.

In regards to "simple changes to systems/software take over six months" - this depends on which system needs updating and what the urgency of the change is. Changing something on the mainframe will easily take over six months unless it's a legal issue. Systems that are processing core business functions have very tight controls around change because a mistake can literally cost millions of dollars. We have other systems you could have updated by the end of the week.

We're not 5,000 people supporting one massive application. We have systems that serve completely distinct user bases, each with their own IT staff and way of doing business. Of course there are plenty of ways we can improve (I could list 100 off the top of my head) but it's not as bad as is being implied in this post. If we're talking about the same company, I'd be interested to know which division the friend in question is working with.

Small percentage here

[nurb432]

About 250 for close to 40000 end users across a few thousand sites.

All platforms.

not a web company? oh no..

[crossmr]

my last company was also not a web company..the only people not in "IT" as broad as that is, was basically legal, the secretary and the guy who moved furniture around..

heh...

[Anonymous Coward]

My company currently has about 2000 people working for it (we're fortune 500 sized)....about 1000 computers total....We have a help desk staff of 2, myself the network admin...my boss who is a director of IT, and 2 application support folks who support our backend apps.

That's it.

I brew my coffee...

[Nick Driver]

I brew my coffee with Water Joe, you wimps.

Re:I brew my coffee...

[Firehed]

Pfft, I brew my coffee with espresso.

Re:I brew my coffee...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Wuss. I drink Turkish coffee.

Our solution

[Anonymous Coward]

250 Employees, 2 people in IT.

the solution was quite simple actually, each department has a designated 'geek-like' worker, may it be marketing or accounting etc. they consent to give rudimentary support in exchange for a small raise in salary. most of the work is basic windows stuff. they are the only ones allowed to call the 2 IT people who handle more complex tasks. statistically you would almost always find a half-competent guy that can fix trivial problems within a group of 20 or so people

Re:Our solution

[Ticklemonster]

Our I(dio)T department has made it clear that this is an unacceptable solution. Shame, too, as there are several people who know way more about troubleshooting problems than our main I(dio)T person.

What we do

[ironicsky]

It really depends on how the company was managed. I work for a smaller company, (50 employees), we have three IT staff including myself. (7 programmers, and a bunch of useless accountants/sales people) We get away with it quite easily. Everything is properly managed. We use Group Policies to manage PC Configuration, System Inventory software to track assets and whats actually installed/used on each PC, we use WSUS to push out Windows updates, and a host of other system automation tools. We have a VoIP phone system hooked up to a PRI allowing us to manage/configure phones in a matter of seconds Our hardware vendor is prompt, most system replacements happen same day or next day depending on when we order, all our systems are modern hardware, so we're not constantly replacing things. So most of the time, 3 IT people is actually too much since we've automated most of our jobs and it just involves us checking logs and doing physical stuff

Rotio of IT workers to Overall

[agristin]

Is a bit like lines of code (LOC) as a metric.

LOC measures something that has a some relation to complexity (more lines is usually more complex) but has nothing to do with quality or functionality. It is also almost impossible to draw specific conclusions by comparing on project's LOC to another's LOC.

Pretty much the same with ratio of IT to over employees. You can't really compare very well between companies, and more employees in IT doesn't mean better service or higher value in return to the company.

I manage applications development for . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

a government agency with about 800 employees with FTEs and contractors combined, we have about 20 software developers. Desktops, MS Office and networking is handled by another group, and their numbers vary a lot, up when deploying a new version of email, down when things are stable.

We currently are developing 3 new applications and supporting 2 quite large systems. We have 12 FTEs from senior software architects to 3 years of experience coders, and contractors from good coders to senior architect/master coder.

I need at least 4 more staffers to keep our heads above water.

just my $0.02
JR

Telco Numbers...

[DogcowX]

At my company its:

36:1 if you count only onshore IT
22:1 if you count onshore IT + Offshore

Of course since it takes about 4 of *our* offshore people to equate to one useful person onshore, that would change the ratio 31:1.

Re: Let the Trolls Rock!!

[Anonymous Coward]

"How are ya, Cleveland!?"

Great band name ... the CmdrTaco & the Trolls!

Depends on the company and the manager

[plopez]

Good managers know how to hold the line. I worked for a quickly growing small company for a while and as senior staff I made many of the decisions. I realized that most IT departments are seen as cost centers. As such I tried to follow four principles:

1) Keep costs down by not over buying or locking into any vendor. Using appliances where ever possible for file, web, mail and print servers etc.

2) Immediately target projects that brought efficiency and cost savings to the people with billable hours. And required the smallest staff needed.

3) When ever possible, if doing work for external clients (e.g. data prep and publishing), bill out our hours. We were up to 75% self funded at one time.

4) Get close to the users and get them to understand how we brought value to their work and try to understand their problems.

As the company grew the principals felt the need to bring in a "professional" IT manager. Over time, all 4 of those disappeared. As a result, costs skyrocketed (MS will eat you alive), billable hours disappeared, IT projects ground to a standstill as we analyzed things to death (analysis paralysis) and user dissatisfaction grew. After a couple of years i got disgusted and quit. The manager was fired about 6 months later.

I think most IT departments get over staffed mainly due to poor managers just throwing people and money at problems (see "The Mythical Man-Month" by Brooks). They don't seem to understand they are seen as a cost center and that holding costs, defraying costs to external sources and having higher customer satisfaction is the key to survival.

I just don't get it, why managers don't "get it." This isn't rocket science.

Re:Depends on the company and the manager

[freeweed]

They don't seem to understand they are seen as a cost center

I agree with you that poor management is what kills IT, but in my experience the problem IS that they see IT as a cost center. The minute this expression is used, shit starts hitting the fan in my experience.

Companies with any brains in their management structure realize that IT is a COST SAVINGS organization. If it was a fscking cost center only, YOU COULD GET RID OF IT. IT saves companies money, when done right. That's why we have computers in the first place, folks. I swear some managers honestly think they're just a flashy fad.

Another stupid gem that once you hear, it's time to jump ship: "We're not an IT company" - used as an excuse to outsource/downsize. You're also not a law firm, but I don't see you outsourcing the legal department.

Users end up hating IT. The problem is, managers can hold the fort for years as they destroy a well-working IT organization. "Don't worry, this is just a transition period, things will improve once everyone is used to the new process" may be the most common lie I've ever heard. By the time everyone realizes that the emperor in fact has no clothes, the idiots who decided on this route have collected several large bonuses and are long gone from the company. It takes years more to bring back some semblance of sanity.

And so the pendulum swings...

Re:Depends on the company and the manager

[glitch23]

1) Keep costs down by not over buying or locking into any vendor. Using appliances where ever possible for file, web, mail and print servers etc.

I have 2 points to bring up regarding this. The first is that at my current job as a gov't contractor, we've been told to use appliances as much as possible for various services. We have done that and becaue of the different services we had to deploy we ended up with a diverse set of vendors and a diverse set of appliances. Some appliances are full blown servers that contain a Windows or Linux OS that provide a full suite of utilities and shell access while others include a custom OS with no traditional shell but a locked down CLI. Backup/restore flexiblity also varies across these appliances. My point being is that you have to be careful when you dictate using appliances. In some cases you may as well just use standard commodity servers and build it yourself depending on what you need. This leads me to my second point.

Because I and my team are contractors for the U.S. gov't we have certain security requirements to abide by. In many cases we have found that given the nature of an appliance we can't always comply with security requirements. Many times they have their own identification, authentication, and authorization mechanisms and can't be tied to a central repository. Not all of them support the same level of SNMP (v1 is insecure as opposed to v2c/3 which are at least more secure). You are at the mercy of those vendors to provide sufficient compatibility with the rest of your monitoring and management infrastructure. This may not be an issue for a corporation; it depends on security requirements and existing infrastructure (security and non-security) as to whether an appliance really does give you ease of use.

Appliances are supposed to make life easier and they can if you don't have any existing requirements (especially security) that the appliances must meet. Also remember that the more appliances you get from different vendors, you really could be making your life more difficult instead of easier because of the vast difference in the implementation of the definition of "appliance".

Re:Depends on the company and the manager

[Shados]

Whats worse, is when you get "We're not an IT company" as an excuse to do an half assed job. Let just say I worked for one of the top 10 most profitable companies in the world, and we had a multi million dollar internal IT project. They had a fairly large IT department, and hired more 15-20$/hour consultant (yeah, you get what you pay for, trust me), to rebuild their entire internal software stack from scratch.

They'd cut corners like crazy (web application where the markup is so bad, theres 2 megs of HTML alone to download on every click? Not counting the Flash, images, etc here... Users were going INSANE, and management's excuse for not getting better ressources to get the job done right was always "We're not an IT company, we can't be expected to be able to do better than this!").

It was -rediculous-.

Re:Depends on the company and the manager

[Abattoir]

I just don't get it, why managers don't "get it." This isn't rocket science.

You don't work for a Fortune 100 company. You don't have any comprehension of the levels of political struggle that go into internal purchasing. I worked for a Fortune 100 company - IBM. We provided web services to other Fortune 100-500 companies. Often, we waited weeks or even months while customers we supported had to go through their own political struggles to get funding for projects such as adding something inexpensive (relatively) like a new server, or even disk or memory upgrades.

Enterprise IT is a completely different world from small/medium business IT. People that have only worked for companies with less than 200 people don't understand the scope of these megabehemoths. I worked in a system administration organization with 150 people. Consider that is actually larger than *most* companies in the United States.

Re:Depends on the company and the manager

[Billly Gates]

It seems to me that if you work for a company that already views you as a cost center then you are already screwed.

After all how can you or your contributions be valued if you are an annoying cost that should be eliminated.

I was going to say you need to sell yourself as a non cost center but you tried that. I would quit too in your case as your bond to get fired anyway by the new school of though "avoid any investment and focus on the short term investments only".

I think the internet bubble of 2000 caused much cynicism about anything technology as an investment and its extremely frustrating.

I went back to school after I got booted from IT work myself and I hope I never work in computers again after I graduate. I am thinking of being an accountant as bean counters are the most valuable assest in any company right now. I at least can see the value of investing in systems that save tons of money and get work done.

Also for the slashdotter who asked how what the raito is in their company the answer depends on how technology dependant the company is. Walmart is cheap as hell but has extensive IT that rivals even Google as they are investments that work with their bussiness model. A large law firm only needs desktop support and would have a very low IT to employee ration. It all varies.

Re:Depends on the company and the manager

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds intentional as a way of ensuring their future employment. "See, we made it faster than ever before in our new version!"

Gov Shop

[Anonymous Coward]

6500 users - 400 locations - 100 IT folk

44:1

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a company with ~2200 computers. We have about 50 in our "IT" department. However, that number is pretty misleading. Our layout consists of something like...

Help Desk = 3
PC Trainers = 3
AS400 Programmers = 17
PC Programmers = 7
AS400 Operations = 4
Network/Server = 6
System Support = 8

When you break it down to what really matters, 11 people (System Support + Help Desk) support 2200 computers in 17 different locations. Of our different plants, a few have what you might call an IT person, but typically they are more of just an electrician who knows how to do some basic stuff. It can be really frustrating as my company doesn't have many of the basic support tools that we should have (SMS/Landesk/etc).

P.S. WTF does any company need 17 AS400 programmers for when most of the AS400 hasn't changed at all in the last 3 years, while our 7 PC programmers are putting out tons of content.

I had it rough!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use to work in a school district as the technology coordinator. I was the ONLY I.T. employee for 100+ staff and 1100 students.

To say that it sucked would be a severe understatement.

One man shop

[pgaffney]

I am the IT department at a small manufacturing company with 120 employees, so that's about 1:120. I do ERP/database, network, files, printer + desktop maintainance. It's a lot of ground to cover, and there are definitely some ugly weeks.

pushing information around

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm imagine the more IT staff the better, a lot of businesses could do with a lot less staff. I've worked at many small businesses that have way to much staff for the tasks they do mostly because their information systems are terrible.
There are a hell of a lot of jobs that just involve a person pushing information around to other people.

Bah! Try this

[Anonymous Coward]

Approximately 1/500, very large company with a very large sales base. Not everybody is a knowledge worker, but almost everybody uses IT developed and supported systems...

100:1

[emmjayell]

In my 20 years experience of supplying IT. If your business is small - mid sized (under 2000 employees). And you don't have custom apps. Between 100:1 and 150:1 will provide decent support for computers and packaged apps. If your business is larger often, to reduce costs, you will have help desks and standardized pc / notebook builds. People will have to navigate through a bureaucracy to get a non-standards app on their pc. You can drive the ratio down to 500:1.

On the other hand, if you are in a business where information is your product (banking, library, database), that will drive the ratio the other way. Anywhere between 2:1 and 20:1.

It really just depends on your business. You need to remember that IT resources are an expense, just as much as servers, and network equipment and paper for the printers. So if the business model makes sense, and the technology work - life is good.

Small ratio here at the 'U'...

[quetwo]

I will only speak of my "division" rather than my university as a whole (which is even more depressing). I work for the Physical Plant of a very large university. The Physical Plant supports a student population of about 50,000, a staff/faculity population of about 12,000, and includes a power plant, water system, transportation system, and all the trades (janitors, plumbers, roofers, electricians, etc).

Within the division, there is an IT department with 8 people supporting the infrastructure and servers, and 10 people supporting a single application on one of the servers (it's our accounting / work order system). Our division has about 1,100 workers. So, in theory, we have a 8:1,100 ratio, and if you include the app developers, it's 18:1,100.

Now this does not include the telecom side of the house (which I work in). We support the entire university (not just this division), and have an IT staff of 4 + 4 skilled (technicians and wirepullers). So for the phones, we have 4:60,000, and cable tv (not in the numbers above) we have 2:60,000. Our fiber optics division is supported by 3 guys.

The "central IT" which supports all student networking and services, and our central servers, such as NTP, LDAP, etc. is about 75 people strong (i am not including managers in these numbers). Now mind you, many departments hire their own IT staff. It is said that there are a total of 300 people categorized as IT workers on our entire campus (this includes my department and division).

We are supported by a wide range of applications and servers, including Sun, Linux, BSD, Windows, Novell and some Apple servers. We usually like to find the best-of-breed for each application instead of tying into a single vendor. This means that there isn't a whole out of Microsoft out there except on the desktop.

Hm..

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a university. Our _total_ IT department staff is in the range of about 60 people, but this also includes all the people that don't really do anything IT related (project managers and such).

We service 5000 employees and 8000 students on a near-100% windows infrastructure.

We have a staff of 75, 1 F/T IT

[Trip6]

We are a engineering and manufacturing shop. We just hired a f/t web developer and also recently hired an assistant for the IT person one day a week.

@ a school

[Anonymous Coward]

135 staff
900 students
9 servers (all Mac)
560 computers (510 Mac, 50 Dells)
2 IT people

Really, it more like 1 and a half IT staff. My boss is a teacher who got shoved into being a tech person a few years before they hired me. She's more interested in teaching and helping teachers figure out how to use technology in their classrooms (called integration in the education world) than she is about making it actually work and knowing what to buy. I still go home at the end of the day and rarely get calls afterhours. But it means the past three weeks (opening of school) have been a nightmare and I'm not able to rely on my boss to really help.

In HP, the ratio is about 1:20

[Anonymous Coward]

A pretty meaningless ratio. But might be interesting to check out for one of the tech company - HP.

IT employees count is 8000. (http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/01/hp_cio_randy_mo.html)

Number of employees as of 2007 is 172000. (http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/timeline/hist_00s.html)

And the ratio is about 1:20

Seems efficient. But chat with any HP employees, including the IT staffs, and the common gripe will likely be IT support. Good or bad? Hard to say.

Do you count production developers as IT?

[argent]

It's really going to depend on what the company's doing.

When I was the system/network admin at my last-but-one job, we had at various times between 150 and 400 developers, but they weren't expected to do IT work, they were expected to write code for production and shipping products. Most of the time I was the only "IT" person on the development network. All in all over teh 20 years I was there we never had more than a dozen full time "IT" people, 2-3 handling the administration network, 1-2 on the development network, and the rest on the test floor handling setup and shipping of production systems.

On the other hand, at some companies (such as wall-street trading and video production companies) you may have a 1:1 IT/non-IT ratio, with each trader or artist having a full time dedicated support guy.

Without knowing more about what the company in question does, I can't say whether 1:7 is high or low.

Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually it's not the number of people you look at. You typically measure by IT budget as a percent of revenue. And that varies by industry. I've seen .5% to 5%.

Isn't this why new business models evolve?

[tomtermite]

Thus the software-as-a-service (formerly application service provider) business model. While not right for every organization (we took a bath on the banking industry in the dot-com hey-day), the idea of NO Info Tech support is compelling. Of course, this assumes your staff have minimum skills with a PC/Mac and a browser.

Re:Isn't this why new business models evolve?

[Anonymous Coward]

SaS doesn't do away with IT support. We use Salesforce.com, for example, and we still have a guy doing halftime support to support 10 people. Someone has to understand the stuff.

Metric not the right one

[mark99]

Since many firms outsource, or use contractors, etc, the ration of employees to IT workers is not a very reliable indicator of IT investment. A more interesting one would be how much money a firm spends per worker, this would allow one to compare Chevrons's to Exxon's for example.

Obviously the amount you are willing to spend per employee will depend on the industry and the firms strategy, culture, and many other things too. A dev heavy company like Microsoft or Google will probably count on their own employees doing a lot of the work.

Much smaller numbers in Canada

[Wintermute01]

I'm working in an IT capacity for the first time. We're in the travel industry and we have about 500 employees. There are 5 people in IT. Two are specialized in a particular system. Two (including myself) are general IT support, and the fifth is a network specialist whose real job is managing the department. We're mostly a Windows based company, with a few Macs in place. Previously I worked at a company who had three IT specialists for about 600 employees.

Windows office

[fredgiblet]

3 IT, roughly 50 employees, company does IT consulting among other things so there is actually only an average of 1 IT person present at any given time. Windows only office.

Medium Business IT has to be the worst

[Anonymous Coward]

Specialist Medical Group

Our annual budget is something like 1.5million which is spent mostly on contractual updates for practice management software and such.

40 Doctors
260 Support Staff
18 Physical Locations

15 servers (win2k3)
400 workstations (all XP sp2/3)

IT Staff of.. 3 :(

Companies numbers depends on the business

[mordred99]

My current company is information. Our job is to put the info into our customer's hands. Without us, our customers would not make informed decisions and it would be bad for business for them. So .. we have about 700 people in two locations. We have about 30 system/storage admins, 7 desktop, 12 architecture, 125 app admins, 8 cyber security, 6 network, 15 NOC, 5 data center, 5 access management. Those are the people that login to servers, etc all day long. Other people that report through the IT structure are 10 vendor management, 5 asset management, 30 physical security, 10 change management, etc.
So .. if you look at it ... we have about 350 people in the "IT Division" for a 1:2 ratio. However again it all depends on what you call IT.

I worked for a Fortune 100 company...

[Abattoir]

For 7 years, I worked at IBM, which certainly has a high ratio of IT staff to "normal" staff :-). I specifically worked in ebusiness hosting as a Unix system administrator.

Yet she mentioned even simple changes to systems/software take over six months.

That surprised me at first when I worked at IBM. It didn't take six months, necessarily, but a lot of planning and team effort went into doing system changes. Even growing a filesystem could take weeks to get all the approvals, despite that being a non-impacting change. It sounds ridiculous to anyone who has worked for a small company, but realize that the margin for error is much smaller. If we caused a system outage for a customer, they might literally be losing thousands of dollars every minute the system is down, because many of the customers were other Fortune 100 (and 500) companies.

Contrast to my current employer where we support website operations for some small companies (less than 20 people total). If one of their servers is down for an hour, it might delay a code deployment and cost them *some* money, but not anywhere near the scale of the companies I supported at IBM.

various experiences

[roc97007]

I've also noticed that larger IT departments don't necessarily mean better service. The problem with this observation is that management is likely to conclude the inverse is also true -- that the way to keep performance high is to run "lean and mean" (translation: overworked and pissed off) and depend on high pressure and constant threats of outsourcing to raise performance levels. What they actually get is "brain drain" (only the untalented and timid remain at the job) and a rat's nest of off-the-cuff solutions. Eventually the company has to lower it's IT expectations or outsource to some three-letter company and suffer through a major transition. But I digress.

I had the opportunity once of working for a utility in a major metropolitan area that had two competing power companies -- gas and electricity. Both had the usual Winders/*NIX/BigIron mix. The one I worked for (I won't say which) used the "lean and mean" approach (see above) which meant the more talented and/or energetic of us were pretty much in constant interview mode.

And so, at one point I had a rare opportunity to interview with the competition, and learned a few things. I say rare because attrition was practically non-existent. The IT budget of our competitors was -- I kid you not -- an order of magnitude larger than ours, with at least three times the personnel. Amazingly, the expected service level was about the same. At first, I thought, "what a waste" and took some pride in the fact that my group had been able to do as much with far less. But then I noticed a few things at this other company. Attrition was extremely low. Talented people stayed at the job and seemed happy about it. Outages were much rarer and more easily dealt with. They actually had an on-call rotation and a DR plan. Stress was way lower. They ended up not hiring me (too much competition for one seat) but the interview was a thought-provoking experience.

It was interesting seeing, for the first time, an IT position that was just a job, and not a continuous, grinding ordeal. It gave me higher goals in subsequent job searches.

I'm not saying that bigger is necessarily better. I guess I'm saying that you have to be "big enough" to provide a sustainable level of service -- to have the headroom for planning and organization, to keep adequate track of your service contract costs and equipment rotation, and enough spare cycles and budget to put emergency procedures in place. Whether your big, adequately funded IT organization can actually do this is a direct function of leadership -- else all you get is the same morass with more time to play and more toys to play with.

Not that many

[RobinH]

We have about 100 to 120 people spread out over one corporate office and 7 branch offices. IT staff: 2.

Must be nice...

[WCMI92]

My company has 20 locations and 800 employees. And employs only 2 full time IT people, with 2 interns to help us...

1:180 or so

[hoyty]

K-12 School
125 Faculty with tablets
700 Students of which 450 Students with tablets
75 Staff with desktops
12 Servers
70 Classrooms with AV setup

5 IT staff

Running over 50% Windows Vista, remaining Windows XP
Servers mostly Server 2003 starting to go to 2008

Excellent insight from all posters!

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not read any of it and shall completely ignore it while preparing the next round of IT layoffs and offshoring to help improve the bottom line. regards, Your CIO

Re:What about...

[MightyMartian]

The ratio to niggers to whites?

I'm thinking more the ratio of faux-racist ACs on /. getting their heads pulverized and their brains leaking out on to the sidewalk to those pulverizing their heads and watching their brains leak over the sidewalk.

Re:What about...

[Anonymous Coward]

At least 4:1. If there's one thing niggers hate (other than working), it's a fair fight.

community college, 32:1

[bcrowell]

The community college where I teach has 22 IT workers out of a total staff of 706, for a ratio of 32:1. I think they stay pretty busy. One of the side-effects is that in order to simplify things, they push hard for supporting only one OS, which is Windows. The campus is extremely reluctant to provide macs, and when it comes to my linux box that I brought from home to put on my desk, they barely tolerate it on their network.

Just admin or software development?

[ralphdaugherty]

IT Department Staff ratio to overall employees is a fair question, but unless the answers are broken down by category of IT work the answers are useless.

    How many are admins, and for what operating systems and technologies? How many help desk? How many management, including project managers, business analysts, and documentation people?

    And then finally you get to what makes the difference, whether the business develops/modifies software for itself or not. That's where the person asking the question is referring to a simple software change taking six months. By the way, simple as in how? Also, how much of the six months is a backlog before they even started on it?

    In the end, only cost effectiveness is the real answer, as it levels out buy versus build decisions. And cost effectiveness is one of those things that can be rationalized any way someone wants. So that's why questions like this get asked and there are never any clear answers.

    At least until they go under.

  rd

GM/OnStar

[Anonymous Coward]

Approaching 1 in 3.

And changes are approaching six months for trivial patches.

Re: Quality Beats Schedule?

[dudeman2]

Quality beats schedule? Only to a point. Real artists ship.

School Ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a university and the ratio breaks down as follows:

1 Main Campus which consists of 3 sites with around 200 staff and faculty and around 900 students

8 cities with remote sites consisting of classrooms 2 of which also contain offices - Each site has a number of professors and the offices contain about 5-10 staffers.

Currently there are about 3000 students enrolled in the remote program.

There are 6 IT people (includes the director) to maintain this entity - and one does nothing but database work while the other maintains nothing but the e-mail and blackboard system.

I think we do a pretty good job for a small department. Our main problem is underfunding as opposed to man-power right now. I agree with previous statements... a tight knit small group can be waaaayyyyyyy more productive than a massive army with no cohesion.

Re:What about...

[Anonymous Coward]

While at least you can say you're not a racist, you are a hateful motherfucker, arn't you?

Doctormoe

[Anonymous Coward]

In my company it is nearly half of all the people at headquarters. This translates though to less than 1% of all employees worldwide. I spent 10 years working in this IT department before moving to the business side of the organziation. This is NOT a technology comapny but I will tell you the IT department is like the Matrix, it feeds off the business. It cannot deliver anything timely, blocks business, and charges allocations for thier actual cost nearly 3.5 times what the same services can be purchased on the street. During a recent down sizing, this organizaing reduced its size 30% by eliniating the bottom most staff. No one director or level above was let go. No we find ourselves with the right number of heads and an inabilty to deliver results. The IT department at my company sucks horribly and is filled with incompetent, narcisscisent, arrogant people whose only interest is their self preservation.

What about Automation?

[Anonymous Coward]

I look at IT in a very different manor. Everyone mentions IT's job is to provide support (which I agree with), but no one seems to mention IT's true purpose: automation. The point of IT is to make each member of your company more effective and efficient.

I'm not suggesting the goal is to have people laid off; however, I do think one of IT's goals is to thwart people growth.

As for the size of the staff, that all depends on the company. I've seen companies where people weren't expected to know Excel and they relied on IT to do their job. Corporate culture dictates a lot of this.

Other Metrics

[SenorFluffyPants]

In addition to this one, we also report annually on 2 others that may be of interest to you:

1. Total IT spending per employee
2. Total IT spending as percentage of total revenue

I'd echo what others have said here and tell you that this can fluctuate pretty dramatically depending on the business you're in.

Oops.

[Behrooz]

...I didn't know managers got mod points, that explains everything. Crap.

man month myth

[Anonymous Coward]

over 5,000 IT employees ... numerous consultants doing IT work as well ... even simple changes to systems/software take over six months

Why am I not surprised?

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[AdamInParadise]

Actually, I consulted with them for about a month and my responsability was very limited so from my point of view it was just funny. I check their website from time to time to see if they've finally managed to release the product. Of course some of their programmers already left, but the remainings are H1-Bs... Good luck on your next job.

Also factor of the competency of non-IT

[maxbash]

Not only is it a factor in the type of business and the effectiveness of the IT department but also of competency of the other employees. I work for local government despite what many people think about goverment, I work with some of the smartest and hardest working people. Our director manages people well, and hires only great people. Though we would need less people if I could say the same about other departments. It often a challenge to give good support with stopping people from manipulating us in doing their job for them.

Apples vs oranges vs grapes vs watermelons

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a global company whose products are some of the most complex machines ever created by humans. Our executives keep wanting to compare our IT operation to our "peer companies," which I find to be a hoot. While there are a handful of other companies in the world who do what we do, none of them do it the same way, on the same scale, or with the same results. And there is simply no way to compare the IT world of my company to that of, say, large retailers or even other so-called "technology" firms. But here goes.

For about 160,000 employees, about 10,000 work under the CIO. 16-to-1? Not so fast. Those 10K people include app developers, product and project managers, architects, accountants, and entire organizations whose job is to talk to the other business units to figure out what they need and how to bill them for it.

When you look at the people who actually run one of the largest private networks in the world, with close to half a million networked devices, there are maybe a thousand people who actually touch the gear on a regular basis. The other 9,000 are basically telling them what to do and when, and providing a buffer to the rest of the business.

The infrastructure being managed is all over the map (literally). There is a huge Windows environment, but also many critical things on Unix and mainframes, and a growing Linux infrastructure. There is also lot of gear in our data centers which belongs in museums. The network is global, multi-vendor, and not outsourced - we run it ourselves.

As a result, there is a lot specialization within IT. It is very rare for one person to do web development, sysadmin, network admin, and security. Each of those disciplines has its own organization. Security has its own VP.

This may sound horribly bureaucratic, and it often is (Dilbert is a documentary). But the alternative is chaos. You simply can't run an operation that big any other way. On the plus side, you generally don't have a problem getting access to the latest tech, as some manager somewhere has read about it and wants IT to kick the tires. Also, there's a lot of opportunity to move around. I have had three separate careers in IT, all within the same company. If I had to be a generalist who did it all for a small firm I could do that, but find it quite satisfying to be the expert in a specific area.

Her numbers are wrong

[solid_liq]

I easily believe there are 5,000 IT people in a Fortune 100 company. I bet there are actually a lot more than that. I don't believe that a Fortune 100 company could have only 35,000 employees. If that were the total number of employees, it would not possibly be in the Fortune 100 list. That's too small. She probably was talking about the one skyscraper she works in, not the total numbers for the whole company. Check out the company in finance.google.com. I bet the number of employees you see there is far greater. I worked for a company a few years ago that was barely too small to make the Fortune 500 list, and they had at least 150,000 employees in that one city alone, and many many more around the nation.

High School Environment

[Anonymous Coward]

Only about 100-120 employees (if you count part-time coaches, etc), but 970 students, giving ~1100 users supported (~350 PCs and laptops + 15-20 servers and infrastructure devices.)

2 tech staff, including me.

Platforms: 1 run Linux on whatever I can. Windows on the rest.

My work

[Drakin020]

I wish I would have jumped into this thread sooner.

My company has about 60 employee's local, and about 30 remote.

We have about 25 Windows 2003 Servers, and 4 Linux Servers.

I am the network administrator, and I have my Director of IT, and Software Developer.....That's it.

I'd say we are under staffed in the IT area.

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[Anonymous Coward]

So I suppose that means that when you made a mistake, you had six different people coming by to tell you about it?

If I were you, my only real motivation would be not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired...

13/1200 Personell, but 13/700 PC's

[BigAssRat]

We have 13 in our department, which includes the CIO (who ironically can't really be included in this count since he knows crap about IT) and we have about 1200 employees total. However we have around 700 PC's. So which is a better ratio to measure off of IT to employees or computers?

We're 1:100 ratio or thereabouts

[Onlyodin]

We have about 1500 employees on the books, and I would have suggested we have a small team of about 15 I.T. Staff (From Service Desk to Management), but we also have a team of 5 in a 'projects' division working with an external partner on our in house business applications (software).

15 actually does us quite well (including telephony services), considering our environment - we're a windows outfit (as much as I'd like to change that), but we have over 30 small branch offices and 15-20 large offices. We still do almost everything in-house which is great, testing and trying new technologies, deploying more new offices every year and refreshing equipment in the eternal attempt to thwart the electronic death.

Have a little excess capacity or else your sunk

[a1englishman]

It's about having enough people to get the work done efficiently, and having enough people to handle occasional spikes. Your development team should not be doing support all the time. Everyone should have things to do, but have a little extra capacity, because things come up, and research must be done. If your staff is working excessive hours at nominal loads, what are you going to do when you have an emergency? The support team should be able to do support, without dumping on the development team. In some places, the developers are the only people who know how all systems work, and how systems can impact each other. Having narrow minded people working in support rolls isn't going to get problems solved.

Somewhat math based

[Cruel Angel]

I would expect that there is a formula something like the Erlang C equation that could be used to determine IT staffing needs. I also think that the right question isn't number of non-IT staff to IT staff, but instead, systems to IT staff, or perhaps a combination of the two. For example, while a desktop support person or a helpdesk person is more concerned with users, a developer or operator is more concerned with systems (generally speaking). At the university where I work, there's around 600 IT staff supporting students, staff and faculty. Let's say about 30,000 students, 2,500 faculty and 2,000 non-IT staff at peak season.

RE: Ratio of IT Department Workers To Overall Empl

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a manufacturing plant. A relatively small company with multiple locations. We have about 300 to 400 employees total, it varies seasonally. We have 80 computers total of which about 15 are servers and 65 workstations, of the 80, 2 servers are windows, the rest FOSS (Ubuntu, CEntOS and FreeBSD) This includes all services including VOIP, etc. The server count is affected by the fact that many servers are separate or replicated due to the multi-location situation and we also use separate servers for things like DNS, VPNs, shares, databases, etc. which could be consolidated but because we had the hardware for cheap, we run on separate servers. The workstations are 6 windows and 59 Ubuntu (mostly Hardy, some are still 7.10). There are an additional 10 VPN-connected remote machines, also a mix of windows/Linux. There are also additional wireless terminals that run an embedded Linux and telnet to the database that are not included in the above count. The IT department has a total of 3 of us. That makes the ratio of all employees 100:1 to 133:1 but most of those don't use computers (they are what some call "unskilled" labor for manufacturing). The ratio to computer users is more like 20:1. A lot of the support we provide is well beyond the scope of IT, but from the perspective of the company culture, that must be what IT does, because we are doing it. So I agree with many of the above posts. Each situation is different. and the "rules" are completely arbitrary. At our current ratio we are always busy. sometimes too busy perhaps. When most of the workstations were windows, we used to spend a lot more time just 'tending' to them. As we switched, after the initial training and learning-curve/adjustment period, we were free to work on more projects which added value, but also added to our work load. What is interesting, that this subject brings up, is how just 1% or less of the total workforce is so critical to the business. If IT stopped, it wouldn't just be an inconvenience, it would pretty much be the end. (of course that's why we have built-in redundancy, documentation and standard best-practices so that if we were all run over by a bus there would be alternatives). Like electricity, it is just taken for granted. but it is still a testament to the power of technology's ability to multiply one's efforts to contribute to an enterprise (to replace, for instance, so many people in accounting, before the advent of the computer by just a few people tending to their computers). So I guess the short answer is the right ratio, is the one that proves to work best. Which of course doesn't just depend on how many, but the skill set, and level of commitment, enthusiasm, etc, they bring to the table. So you have Situation/Skill-set(s)/Quantity Which is another reason why it's hard, at best, to reduce it to a ratio, given the three factors, you would never be comparing apples-to-apples. Just my two cents.

1:120 in the truck industry too

[aoteoroa]

We have 120 staff, and 72 ms windows users in our company, and an IT department of one person. . . .me. And my primary job was not supposed to be managing computers but creating documentation on our accounting system.

Large company ratios

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparel company - many brands, international
PC User to PC Desktop tech ratio is about 100:1
Mac User to Mac desktop tech ratio is about 350:1
That is strictly desktop users to desktop support - no real grip on the numbers for network, servers, email, security, internet, etc support groups for the same userbase, but each team has a few folks on it.

As a side story, I was once dinged on an annual review by a manager who was strictly by the numbers of tickets closed. He didn't understand that because my building of HR and Finance users was more advanced than the building of call center folks, that my problem tickets were fewer, but more complex and took longer to complete - 1-2 hours was typical versus a 15 min ticket for the call center techs mapping printers and unjamming printers. I also tried making the argument that by having lower ticket count I was showing my value - MY users were up and running more than the other buildings. But that didn't fly with the bean-counter manager. So I told him if he just wanted higher numbers of tickets - sheer volume only - put me in the call center building and my numbers would spike.

I moved the next week and for the rest of my time there I was the #1 ticket closer out of about two dozen techs. The guy who swapped places with me had his ticket counts drop dramatically. If this manager would have come from a technical background rather than a management background, he would have understood that.

not enough, more, probably alot

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm in electronics manufacturing and out of 120 only 4 are IT and that is only if you count the IT "Manager" who warned me "Don't talk to me about programming!!"

Brooks had it right. Reading the book would help.

[BlackCreek]

And, no matter what Fred Brook's sacred book says, there really is a magic bullet for software development.

Did you actually read that book?

Because he specifically says that he was talking about a single magic bullet. One and only one magical bullet that would cause a ten-fold increase in productivity.

Yet you say he is wrong, and the proof we are offered for it is the use of positive and totally vague adjectives with software development factors: "sound", "proper", "quality". In other words: "hand waving".

Then you start complaining that the field is

obscured by vapour, hype and gas...

When everything thing you did was to play (your own) buzzword bingo

But in typical slashdot fashion, you whine a lot, misrepresents a classical proposition, talks with confidence, yet without any content, and all the clueless mods jump in.

Veterinary Clinics

[Linker3000]

Two of us support 30 veterinary clinics, a diagnostics lab and an animal hospital. There's about 180 staff and 100 computers. Due to acquisitions we run a mix of OSs in the clinics from NT4 to Vista. 25 sites have their own Win2K servers and due to the bespoke nature of the clinic software, we have the servers covered by a contract with the software house. Most staff spend their time in the Practice Management Apps, checking email (Outlook or Thunderbird), On the Intranet (Firefox) or drafting letters/checking clinic stats (OpenOffice for the general staff, MS Office 2003 for the Managers because Oo's spreadsheet could not cope with some of the macros in the Management sheets).

For infrastructure services (email, Intranet,data mining, inter-site backups, VoIP, video security and SMS messaging (appointment reminders)), we have 9 Linux servers at various locations.

As many posters have pointed out, there's no magic formula for planning IT Support numbers - especially when you move outside a 'cosy' corporate environment.

Our biggest hassle is interfacing with the authors of one of the clinic apps as their support quality is abysmal. The Linux servers give us the least trouble, the bespoke software/Win2K servers the most - mainly due to one apps' poor implementation of data replication, which is always going wrong.

You guy's have it easy!

[Daryen]

Where I work the ratio is 1800:2 and the guy I work with can't even do basic windows tasks, so it is 1800:1 for all intents and purposes.

Oh, and for bonus points we're only budgeted $16.66 per user per year for software/licensing/equipment/supplies. More than 1/3 of it goes to ink...

Oh, and the pay sucks too.

hidden costs

[Anonymous Coward]

My fortune 500 company has cut back severely in IT staff and outsourced most of it. But now, it has forced every group to have their "pseudo IT guy" because they just can't support users' needs. So the accountants talk about how much money is being saved, but the cost is much greater than the savings in decreased efficiency. For example, if a user can't get a corporate tool working, their call to IT gets routed to an entry level tech in India with a script: "Is your computer plugged in?" Invariable, the solution is: "Please ship your laptop to our central location, we'll re-image it, and you'll have it back in 1 week.""

more important is the worker/management ratio

[whoisearth]

As many people have stated, this isn't a clear cut answer. Throwing in my 2 cents though, the problem is that many, many companies (mine included) seem to have a hard problem understanding the difference between IT and IT Management. Too often have I seen a glut of managers/project leaders/etc. and not enough people to do the actual work that's being asked. I would be more curious to see how many companies (mine included) that have a grossly out of proportion ratio in workers/management.

in my company

[vuffi_raa]

we have 4 full time IT staff for 120 (roughly) people 3.333...%. they are ridden like ponies, but then all of us try to do as much of the IT as we can on our machines to help out-

Engineering IT needs more support

[Michael Snoswell]

I've worked in a number of engineering companies (employees ranging from 60 to a few 1000 over 25 yrs), one of which I was IT Manager and looking back the ratio was always about 1:25 though there were technical/IT specialist embedded in departments who helped out on support so the true ration was maybe 1:20. Banks don't need as many IT ppl as they have lots of clerks and secretarial type workers who can all be easily supported (at 1:50 or even 1:100).

A friend heads up a NGO (non government organisation, doing charity work) and supports 600+ desktops and servers with 4 people but they're all exactly the same desktop with only a small handful of linux and windows servers.

So in general the more diversified the computing needs of the users, the more IT support you'll need. The Eng company that I worked at with 60 people needed 4 IT staff (1:15) as they had, Windows, Linux and SGI servers+workstations, your regular MS Office Apps, accounting and some serious high end applications (like where the sw costs more for one year's maintenance than the users salary) and was spread over 3 countries. But then that was the exception - of the 60 people, 17 had Phds, which is not normal!!

my numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

I am one of eight in IT, in an organization of about 150.

Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I

[pnutjam]

3 people in our IT staff, about 250 users. Over 3/4 thin-client environment, and the 50 desktops we have take up 1/2 my time.
:(

Look at the maturity model.

[the7cs]

I'm a consultant, so I'm in and out of about a dozen companies' IT departments every year. What I've found is that there is this imaginary pendulum that swings between the environment being user-driven vs. being IT department dictated. The pendulum is always somewhere between, and it's always moving in one direction or the other. The more user-driven you are, the more support staff is required to keep everything running because each department is using software of their own choosing that the poor IT department has to get to interact with some other software for some other department (this is common in healthcare and academia). When an organization is highly standardized and driven by IT, you can operate with fewer IT folks and lower costs, but the users are miserable and surly (this is common in manufacturing and government). Thus, the pendulum swings back and forth from comfort to efficiency because you can rarely have both. IT staff size ebbs and flows accordingly, except in some organizations where no one ever leaves or gets fired, but no one updates their skill sets, so they always have to hire more people to take on the new projects that come along (also common in government).