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.
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....
Easy peasy (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:In Australia (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Can easily handle 120 end users amongst 2 Staff (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Makes sense (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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How about IT Managers / overall employees? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Makes sense (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 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".
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).
Re:no set ratio (Score:1, Interesting)
Another major source of income was in servicing the controls.
Out of curiosity: were the service engineers included in your 10% figure of "production workers"? I can't wrap my head around the inefficiency of a company in which only 10% of the salaried personnel is responsible for generating all revenue.
hps group (Score:1, Interesting)
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
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.
1:150 (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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.
Our solution (Score:1, Interesting)
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
Re:So let's flame on... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Actually, that is precisely what Fred Brooks argued. By saying there is no silver bullet, he meant that there was no simple answer to improving software quality. And if you think your solution of "doing software properly" is a simple answer, we have radically different definitions of the word "simple".
From his paper:
"...though no technological breakthrough promises to give the sort of magical results with which we are so familiar in the hardware area, there is both an abundance of good work going on now, and the promise of steady, if unspectacular progress."
He then lists off several areas which he believed (back in 1986) would help to give us that increase in software productivity -- among which was good design. The difference is that he recognized it was going to be the combined effects of improving multiple areas (design, code reuse, etc.) that could give us an order of magnitude improvement.
That is in fact why his essay became "sacred", because in spite of making seemingly outrageous claims at the time, he's been vindicated over and over again.
Course this was posted early this morning and I'm only just catching up on my /. reading so this comment will likely go unnoticed...