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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.
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.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
maybe, but what if it's a bank which lives and dies by it's it systems?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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....
I am the only human in my own little IT firm, that makes a 1 in 1 ratio...
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.
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
Defective Logic
1- The company she works is a partner company for CIA.
2- Non-IT people are over 70+ years old, Joe Sixpacks.
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.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
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.
Mostly Windows XP / Server 2003
19 IT Folk / 483 Total Employees =~ 4%
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.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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.
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.
We had 640 employees, 4 locations and 9 IT staff.
150 pc's and laptops currently being used, 2 IT staff. Mining Industry.
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.
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.
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
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.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
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.
We get by with 1 full-time and 3-part time, for 4 locations and about 100 users.
We're exactly talking about this, you got the point! Congratulations! Take your xanax pill next time.
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.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
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.
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.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Seriously. I can't see a company of that size needing more than maybe 25 total IT workers, and that's being generous.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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.
The ideal ratio is of employees to IT is 22:7
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]
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.
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.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
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.
Nobox: Only simple products.
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.
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.
slashdot rocks
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.
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
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.
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.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
14 Developers, 4 Sysadmins, 4 support crew, 2 managers. Company of 3000 in 6 spread-out locations, not including 5 beyond our borders
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
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.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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...
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.
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...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
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
C - the footgun of programming languages
How about IT Managers / overall employees or IT employees. Now that would be interesting.
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 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
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!
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.
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.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
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!).
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We have 16,000 employees and Nick Burns, our company's Computer Guy.
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.
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 :)
ISV, 30 employees, one-half IT technician. So a ratio somewhere between 1:30 and 1:60 might be reasonable to say.
while true; do eject; eject -t; done
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.
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.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
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.
: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.
:) 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.
:) 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.
The core IT staff is 7 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
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
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...
Connection closed by foreign host.
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.
Duh!
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
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
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"35,000 employees, over 5,000 IT employees"
A totally Microsoft Vista shop?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
And that includes PC & network support (manufacturing company). My guess is the 1:7 company runs mainframes. We run UNIX....
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
HTTP/1.1 400
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.
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.
Statesman
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
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.
no comment
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.
> 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.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
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".
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.
I think I need a new sig here.
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.
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.
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.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
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.
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
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.
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.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
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.
They're using their grammar skills there.
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
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.
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.
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.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Sounds like a business plan to me, one that any contemporary CEO would certainly buy into.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
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.
About 250 for close to 40000 end users across a few thousand sites.
All platforms.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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..
I brew my coffee with Water Joe, you wimps.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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
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
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.
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.
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
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.
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.
- Ubique, Tom Termini www.bluedog.net - WebObjects / J2EE SOA / iPhone solutions for knowledge workers
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.
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.
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.
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.
.. 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.
So
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.
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
We have about 100 to 120 people spread out over one corporate office and 7 branch offices. IT staff: 2.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
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.
My company has 20 locations and 800 employees. And employs only 2 full time IT people, with 2 interns to help us...
Corporatism != Free Market
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.
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
Hoyty
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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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
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.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Quality beats schedule? Only to a point. Real artists ship.
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.
No reason to lie.
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. :-)
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The weathers here - Wish you were beautiful
I'd echo what others have said here and tell you that this can fluctuate pretty dramatically depending on the business you're in.
...I didn't know managers got mod points, that explains everything. Crap.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Yes, but universities pay like crap anyway so it doesn't matter. Am I wrong?
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.
Nobox: Only simple products.
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.
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.
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.
No reason to lie.
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.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Two Rules For Success:
1) Never tell people everything you know.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
AT&ROFLMAO
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No reason to lie.
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.
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-
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!!
pithy comment
Gee that narrowed it right down.
+++OK ATH
How about shutting down some worthless programs?
+++OK ATH
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...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
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.
:(
Cheap storage VM.
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).