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

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

[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

[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:That's a lot o' IT

[timmarhy]

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

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

[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

[Colin Smith]

Which is why you have

development -> testing -> live

Bureaucracy doesn't create quality, testing does.
 

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: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." ;)

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?

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.

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...

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: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.