Ratio of IT Department Workers To Overall Employees? 385
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.
In Australia (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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:high School (Score:1, Informative)
I work at high school also... 150 desktops, 330 students, 50 staff. Itâ(TM)s just me. I usually have no problem taking care of the place when school is in session. Itâ(TM)s the stuff during the summer like upgrading machines, running cable, installing projectors that can be annoying. But it really depends on the type of company you work for. For education a 250:1 ratio is not bad. Some districts have one guy covering four urban high schools. Thatâ(TM)s like 10,000:1. Explains why tech is so great in our school systemsâ¦
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.
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: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.
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.
Google answer on it (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Makes sense (Score:3, Informative)
Which is why you have
development -> testing -> live
Bureaucracy doesn't create quality, testing does.
Couldn't disagree more: testing just finds defects it doesn't _produce_ quality. Quality engineers produce quality requirements, quality architecture, quality design, quality implementation, quality V&V, etc, etc.
Re:That's a lot o' IT (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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.
Brooks had it right. Reading the book would help. (Score:3, Informative)
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.