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Ratio of IT Department Workers To Overall Employees?
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Aug 23, 2008 01:07 AM
from the efficiency-and-critical-mass dept.
from the efficiency-and-critical-mass dept.
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.
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Submission: Ratio of IT department to overall employees by Anonymous Coward
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no set ratio (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no set ratio (Score:5, Interesting)
A very good point. I work in an internet cafe, and everyone - even the manager - is IT staff. If anyone there weren't IT staff, our efficiency would go out the window. I'm just pleased that my first job in IT didn't land me with a Pointy Haired Boss.
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Re:no set ratio (Score:5, Funny)
They do, java developer.
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Re:no set ratio (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:no set ratio (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
So let's flame on... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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Re:So let's flame on... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Re:no set ratio (Score:5, Funny)
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 :)
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In Australia (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In Australia (Score:5, Interesting)
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1:100 at many places (Score:5, Interesting)
But yeah... 1:100 ratio is not unheard of at many hospitals. It's all because of outsourcing....
Sixt has that without outsourcing (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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extremely high (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Same here, although at times there are 0% IT staff, like when I'm doing paperwork. And at times there are 200% IT workers, like when I get my better half to lend a hand.
Which brings me over to the question "what is an IT person?"
I am sure that different companies define this differently, and some might consider e.g. payroll processing "IT work", while others include non-IT personnel working for the IT department, like (in order of importance) janitors, cafeteria workers and CIOs. In a big company, they st
Re:extremely high (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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Very heterogenous environment: 1-in-28 (Score:5, Informative)
I'm working at a semi-governmental organisation and I'm frankly amazed at how efficient we are. It's a mixed shop, with Cisco for network equipment, Novell for authentication/file/print sharing/mail servers, Sun for the Unix infrastructure and Linux for all secondary servers. The desktops are 25% Linux, 75% Windows XP.
We're with 200 people, most of them engineers or scientists. Our IT department consists of 7 people.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Until you get the next time where someone has a genius idea with a subtle flaw that doesn't get caught until it goes through the 3rd level of red tape.
When you are talking about a big enough organization, any amount of bureaucracy and layers will pay for itself if it prevents a single huge mistake every couple years.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
as the devil is in the details, and generally not in power point presentations.
That's the most salient point ever made on Slashdot...
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why you have
development -> testing -> live
Bureaucracy doesn't create quality, testing does.
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Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Until you get the next time where someone has a genius idea with a subtle flaw that doesn't get caught until it goes through the 3rd level of red tape.
When you are talking about a big enough organization, any amount of bureaucracy and layers will pay for itself if it prevents a single huge mistake every couple years.
Quite the opposite. Each layer can then try to blame the one above / below it. When there are only 2 / 3 layers of bureaucracy, each takes on more responsibility.
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Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re: (Score:3)
Bingo.
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Informative)
The users and the business hate us.
The same people who install browser tool bars that crash their system, waste 3 of your hours having you read the HP laserjet manual because they can't get their favorite font to print in order to impress a big-wig, etc. Bad users often want the freedom to make a mess, but don't want to pay for the clean-up.
There needs to be better priority allocation such that those who abuse IT services stop getting a free ride.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 int
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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What about technical vs. non-technical within IT? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:What about technical vs. non-technical within I (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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My old orkplace (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Depends on the company (Score:5, Informative)
It really depends on the company and the user base. I've worked in a lot of different environments with a lot of different layouts.
I interned as a developer at a 35 person company in Japan that had 0 IT staff. It was full of developers with a few marketing and business people, and everyone was responsible for managing their own workstation. There were a few knowledgeable employees who helped others with computer problems, but no full-time staffers. E-mail / groupware was outsourced to a third party provider. There was no central authentication or anything of the sort. Surprisingly, the system worked pretty well, although some of the development practices were a bit outdated -- but that's really an orthogonal issue.
I worked at another company here in Vancouver with a similar setup. They had a totally heterogeneous computing environment, users generally manage their own machines (though the IT department provided a base software layout). They did however have a full time IT staff of 4 for 250 employees, and there was some degree of central auth, as well as stuff like databases and our own mail server. There was also a fairly large group of non-technical users, whose machines were completely handled by one of the IT staffers.
Another example, I worked as a contractor at another company here in Vancouver approximately 1200 employees in size. At one point we had 10 satellite offices, and 8 remote IT people, with another 15 full time at the main office here. Everything was large scale.. lots of Oracle databases, racks and racks of NetApps, tons of servers, Unix workstations, a full parallel Windows environment. Huge and complicated.
Currently I'm at a small company of just over 20 employees. However, we have 3 people who are full time "IT". This is to support our highly technical user base of scientists and in-house software developers, and we also have an 80-node compute cluster to run, as well a surprisingly elaborate array of services for the users. However, the need to have 3 staff is mostly because of the different roles to fill. One of us takes care of most of the desktop and user-facing things such as VPN, email, etc. The other two take care of running the simulation systems, maintaining the Unix environment, and working with the developers to develop the software for the cluster and vice-versa.
So as you can see, just in my experience, I can provide four vastly different examples. Every business is different. There's no one formula that can fit all environments. It really depends on your user base and business need.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Merely depends on how HR defines it (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
It depends in part on your definition of "IT" (Score:4, Insightful)
What is IT? Does it include desktop PC installation and maintenance? Running the help desk? The guy who helps fix the copier when it's jammed? The guy who runs the network cables through the ceiling? The gal who programs the PBX and voicemail system? The group doing web design and website maintenance for the marketing department?
Different companies would regard all, some, or none of these as "IT" functions and all, some, or none the people who do them as "IT staff". So it depends in large part on your definition of "IT".
That being said, at my main client (a privately-held manufacturer with about 600 US employees and a couple hundred more overseas), there are only ten IT employees - meaning ALL of IT, including of the functions listed above. Plus two half-time consultants. Three employees do PC installation/maintenance/troubleshooting, one takes the help desk calls (and fixes the copiers/phones), five do programming, web, and database wrangling, and one is the manager (and also the network administrator). One of the part-time consultants does mail and system admin (me), and one does more web design. No other outsourcing, and most of the applications are home-grown custom jobs, so there's no large vendor support for anything. In all, it's about 11 FTEs.
This is a manufacturing company and like most of those that I've seen, they run a very lean operation. IT gets what it needs, but nothing more.
Now, a much more useful metric in my mind is "percentage of total company sales spent on IT". I think it's about 2% for this company (though again, definitions of "IT" are tricky). I've heard that 5% is a more typical number for most companies in the US, speaking across a broad range of industries. Anyone know a source for more concrete numbers?
5000 IT workers? Out of 35.000? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
How many do you need? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Google answer on it (Score:3, Informative)
Of course there are differences by industry... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
My ratio (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Project Athena at MIT (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out this article from the IBM Systems Journal [ibm.com] 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.
Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI Compliance (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Depends on the company and the manager (Score:5, Informative)
Good managers know how to hold the line. I worked for a quickly growing small company for a while and as senior staff I made many of the decisions. I realized that most IT departments are seen as cost centers. As such I tried to follow four principles:
1) Keep costs down by not over buying or locking into any vendor. Using appliances where ever possible for file, web, mail and print servers etc.
2) Immediately target projects that brought efficiency and cost savings to the people with billable hours. And required the smallest staff needed.
3) When ever possible, if doing work for external clients (e.g. data prep and publishing), bill out our hours. We were up to 75% self funded at one time.
4) Get close to the users and get them to understand how we brought value to their work and try to understand their problems.
As the company grew the principals felt the need to bring in a "professional" IT manager. Over time, all 4 of those disappeared. As a result, costs skyrocketed (MS will eat you alive), billable hours disappeared, IT projects ground to a standstill as we analyzed things to death (analysis paralysis) and user dissatisfaction grew. After a couple of years i got disgusted and quit. The manager was fired about 6 months later.
I think most IT departments get over staffed mainly due to poor managers just throwing people and money at problems (see "The Mythical Man-Month" by Brooks). They don't seem to understand they are seen as a cost center and that holding costs, defraying costs to external sources and having higher customer satisfaction is the key to survival.
I just don't get it, why managers don't "get it." This isn't rocket science.
Re:That's a lot o' IT (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:That's a lot o' IT (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:That's a lot o' IT (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Seriously. I can't see a company of that size needing more than maybe 25 total IT workers, and that's being generous.
-uso.
Re:That's a lot o' IT (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Crazy.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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