Slashdot Mirror
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'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?
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Which brings me over to the question "what is an IT person?"
I am sure that different companies define this differently, and some might consider e.g. payroll processing "IT work", while others include non-IT personnel working for the IT department, like (in order of importance) janitors, cafeteria workers and CIOs. In a big company, they still may be employed in the IT division, and count as IT.
That's a very good point. It can work the other way as well, where you have "IT people" who don't work for the IT department. I have no idea how many people work in my company's "IT Department", because I don't work there and generally have no need to talk to them about anything. I work for a department called the "Solution Centre", which is in charge of finding and developing IT solutions for customers (rather than internal IT, which is what our IT department does). I'm employed primarily as a programmer. So, am I an "IT Person" or not? How about the guy in my department who (amongst other things) is responsible for making sure our test network stays up? He doesn't work in the "IT Department" either, but in almost every way can be considered a sys admin.
If you ONLY count our "IT Department", I GUESS we have a ratio of around 1:100 or maybe less, but if you count people outside of the IT department who do IT related work, it's probably closer to 1:5. We've got somewhere around 40000 employees worldwide (not counting third party companies that "live and die" solely by what we do and for all intents and purposes are part of us, just not from the "business" side)
Our main "normal" IT infrastructure is a mix of Linux and Windows servers for various tasks and I think an AS/400 type system somewhere, with almost exclusively Windows XP workstations for employees. In departments such as mine, we tend to be 25% Linux, 40% Windows, 30% MacOS X and 5% Other (including things like a couple of Solaris boxes, one Mac OS 9, and so on. Most of the people in our department have TWO laptops per person - one (usually WinXP system) for the "corporate network" (where we check our email, etc) and one for the "test network" where we do all our real work. On top of that, we have the mix of systems I just described as desktop systems and servers on our test network. The IT department only looks after our corporate network systems (which are mostly WinXP).
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
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.
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.
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+