Ratio of IT Department Workers To Overall Employees?

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

Comments

no set ratio

[timmarhy]

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

Re:no set ratio

[Perf]

So true.

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

The difference?

The first company produced high quantities of inexpensive consumables.

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

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

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

Re:no set ratio

[hdparm]

They do, java developer.

Re:no set ratio

[Mutant321]

how is this flamebait, its accurate.

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

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

Re:no set ratio

[DarkOx]

the most critical task in any IT department is coffee

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

Re:That's a lot o' IT

[timmarhy]

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

1:100 at many places

[VoidEngineer]

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

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

Makes sense

[dotancohen]

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

Re:Makes sense

[WinterSolstice]

I have repeatedly worked for exactly this kind of company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:Makes sense

[blippo]

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

Re:Makes sense

[Registered Coward v2]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Depends on the company

[kisielk]

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let's flame on...

[refactored]

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

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

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

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

Nobody actually has the foggiest.

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

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

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

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

Alas... nobody knows what it is.

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

Now let the trolls ROCK!

Re:So let's flame on...

[johannesg]

Alas... nobody knows what it is.

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

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

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

Re:extremely high

[YttriumOxide]

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

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

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

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