IT Staffing Levels

[bubarooni]

Hi All,

First time in this forum and I hope that it is the appropriate place to post this.

I am looking for general information on IT staffing levels by industry, region, company size, etc. My company is in health care but I would like to be able to show staffing levels in general as well. I will be presenting our department budget next month and am looking for info I can cite in that meeting.

My Googling abilities are apparently in need of help as I cannot find info on it myself. If anyone knows of such info and could post a link to it I'd be most grateful.

Thanks In Advance

 

[CajunCenturion]

I think the IT staffing requirements are dictated by the role of IT within a given company. It's not based on region, industry, company size, or other similar metric. Perhaps the two most influential parameters are the technological sophistication of the company, and the scope of the IT department.

The issue before you is what do you need for your IT department in your company. Do you, right now, in your IT department, have sufficient resources to get the job done? If not, how much more do you need? Only you, at least with respect to this forum, know what your requirements are, and what you currently have at your disposal, and what changes are planned for your department during the next budget cycle. Those are the things which should drive your budget request, not some artificial industry standard that may not fit your corporate profile.

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[bubarooni]

I have 210 users (approx) spread out among five sites. We do user support, maintain a LAN/WAN, write code for our own apps, maintan and develop an intranet, support two cr*ppy and critical third party apps that management is wedded to, implementing some EDI projects, maintain pc's, yadda, yadda, yadda.

We have two people. I want to add an application support specialist. It'd be nice if I could say something similar to "The industry average in health care is 60 users per IT staff member. We are at 105 users per IT staff member."

Pretty graphs would be nice to. Senior Management loves pretty graphs. Especially when using the projector.

 

[chiph]

Do you have a way to categorize and prioritize the work requests from your users?

If you do, you can show that some work just isn't being done because of lack of resources. Of course, management may also say: "Let's get someone in here who *can* get this work done", but that's a risk.

Chip H.


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[kHz]

You can get that information from Gartner and Forrester, who are IT research companies, although their reports are not free.

The BLS may have that information available, too, since the gov. is the biggest collector of data.

ComputerWorld or some other magazine also does an extensive annual IT report.

 

[benlinkknilneb]

Anecdotally speaking, we have about 90 PCs onsite here, and we basically do all the same sorts of things you do aside from the WAN support. There are 2 of us. I'd guess the two of us together could probably support about 150 users before we felt major stress.

A helpdesk system that tracks the amount of time required to complete a request could be helpful. Our system is actually tied to our company quality standard, so we are judged on keeping our response time under 1 day for the average fiscal period. Of course, some programming projects require more than that, but some of our helpdesk tickets take 5 seconds to complete, so it balances out well.

Ben
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. - Douglas Adams

 

[MrTBC]

Hi there.
I think it really depends on the industry. I work in legal in the UK where the users do not like computers and are VERY demanding. Three of us struggle to support 120 users. :-<

 

[bubarooni]

We just added a 'HelpDesk' application to our Intranet. Now getting users to actually use it is a different matter...

 

[Kozusnik]

I'm also in health care (Northern WV). We have many, many applications with about 2500 users over about 10 sites. We write some internal apps and support most everything internally. We do have vendor support for our major apps, but we usually fix most problems without involving the vendor.

Here's a breakdown of our staffing...
1 Director
3 Managers
2 Helpdesk
6 Support Analysts (24x7)
3 Telecomm
3 PC
5 Networking
4 Systems
5 Applications
1 Assistant

Maybe that will help.

Mark

There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

 

[bubarooni]

Anything is of help. That looks to be abound 75 users per IT staff member. My bosses know nothing about the field except that they can't get email when the Internet is down.
Any benchmark I can lay my hands on is ammunition.

 

[langleymass]

It's hard to tell what staffing levels are. Too many people that are compiling stats have agendas. Business "leaders" want to claim that there is a shortage of talent, so they can justify bringing unneeded and untalented foreigners with H1B visas. They also make these claims because they know that they have betrayed IT workers. As a result of this betrayal, many people are not considering IT as a career. These "leaders" just tell more and more lies to compensate for the problems caused by their previous lies.

How do you know when a CEO is lying? It's when his mouth is moving and words are coming out.

 

[Stevehewitt]

We're in finance, and have about 500 users across 3 sites (in the UK). Also support about 15 field sales guys who demand a hell of a lot. (Although that's spread across the dept.)

1 Group IT & IS Director
1 Telecoms / Tech support manager
1 Network manager
1 IS Manager

4 Tech's at Head Office with approx 370 users
1 Tech at Norwich site (me!) with approx 60 users
1 Tech at Manchester site with approx 60 users
1 Helpdesk Co-ordinator
1 IT Adminstration Assistant

2 IS Analysts / Dev's
1 IS Co-ordinator


Seems like a lot when I write it down like that! We're quite IT focused as a company, so we actually get quite a healthy budget and try to be as liberal with people as we can. Also, we spread a lot of the work about. E.G. Head Office will do some work for me when I'm really busy and vice versa. I also do some light Crystal Report work for IS when they are busy etc.

Overall the current number of tech's vs. users is about 85:1 - however the 2 managers do a bit of hands on and project management and the helpdesk / admin people help out too.

Thanks,





Steve.

"They have the internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson

 

[Corran007]

Ill give for my last company

Retail Grocery Store Chain, 50 Stores,1 Corporate office, 7500 or so employees(obviously we have some part timers)

1 Director
1 Programs Manager
6 Developers/Analysts/Software support/anything not hardware related

1 Systems Manager
1 help desk person
1 Server Admin
1 Network Admin
3 Store systems support
1 store systems/pc admin/whatver (hes in another city and is on his own alot, but calls corp when needs help)

 

[JimmyZ1]

tv station in a medium market, I'm the IT Manager, tech, everything, I train people and do all kinds of stuff.

Just me and about 100 users.

Sometime i'm swamped sometimes i'm bored out of my mind, but never is all the work done.

 

[bubarooni]

eek! my deepest sympathies JimmyZ1. what all do you do?

 

[NETscan]

Ok, I’m kind of facing somewhat of the same thing as bubarooni. We are an indusial contracting company that’s computer user base has doubled in the last year. We have somewhere around 250 computers most being laptop’s and more users then computers as some share.

We have employee management issues being we have set communication policies and employees sign the policies on hire-in but our department is not getting support from other department management. We have employees that install P2P software and all the spyware associated with that kind of stuff, online gaming applications like poker, lnstant messengers like Y! or AIM, Live radio software, webshots, weatherbug and so on. I’m sure most of you understand all the added grief allowing this kind of software to be on company computers.

We have 9 servers a RAS unit and 5 offices plus many rooming users and remote projects. We have two support people for the company Technical Communication Staff as we are not only IT. The break down is like this:

First Person:
manage cell phones, manage pagers, maintain printers, Ink Cartridges, pc orders, first level of user support, setup new computers

Second Person (me):
Network Admin/Eng, manage/maintain in-house phone system, manage/maintain/developed in-house software, database Admin/Eng., manage backup’s, manage/maintain door/gate security system, top level user support

I want to add another position to the department and I’m not even talking a tech position I’m talking a clerk position.

My idea for the new position would be:
Answers calls, logs calls, paperwork, basic phone support for MS Office applications. This person would also email a response to the person turning in the support request, informing them of receipt and assignment “who will be handling it “.

I need to have data to show that we can justify the cost and the need. The more I look it seems about 50-75 computers to a tech. I’d like to know if other think this is about right? I’m also open to any recommendations on working management to support communication policies already in place.

Thanks,
NETscan