User to IT ratio
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On Wall St we were 4:1
At the Hedge Fund we were 3:1
In big manufacturing we were like 800:1
In most SMBs we see a few hundred to one working well.
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About 30:1, that includes the Hyderabad office as well. And my users are pretty damn good overall, I truly can't complain.
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The diversity in support is really amazing. Which we have always known. Of course some places like NTG are insane at like 1:3 (one user to three IT) but that is expected. but that some of the biggest companies run at 3:1 when IT is not their business, is really something.
What I think you'll find is that outside of direct desktop support, helpdesk or end user support the user to IT ratio is totally meaningless. Like at Citi or the hedgefund where we were 4:1 and 3:1.... how many of those IT staff supported end users? No idea.... because we never, ever saw people who did that. And nearly everyone in IT only supported other people in IT. I think that any kind of user to IT ratio is super misleading. Banks have more DBAs to user ratio than a lot of SMBs have IT to users.
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We're about 45:1 here (about 145 total company users) ... hardware, software, third-party apps, email, servers, Wi-Fi, mobile, and just about anything else that is electronic or plugs into a wall outlet.
We also sometimes support tenants in our building, but they pay per incident.BTW, our line of business is a cross between Media and Publishing ... Books, eBooks, Magazine, eMagazines, Advertising, Websites (tied to our other products), etc.
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We are maybe 20-25:1 but the corporate guys are more like 300:1 (but thats everyone on their team, not just help desk)
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60:1
Tech startup with ~$500M investment
1,000 users across 6 main offices -
I think a much better question is Hardware + users : IT staff.
You could have a warehouse of 2000 workers and only 10 pcs. Who cares.
I'm at a company with roughly 250 "local" users and 3.5 it staff. But we support probably 700 or more computers and servers just locally.
We are constantly busy and have a ticketing system. We could really use two more it staff, tier 1or 2, to be optimal.
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@Tim_G said in User to IT ratio:
I think a much better question is Hardware + users : IT staff.
I think it needs even more than that. IT Staff is too general to ever compare like this. Maybe users to helpdesk staff would make sense. Or servers to admin staff. Or routers to network staff. Things like that.
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Here is an example of why this makes no sense to use equipment as the guide:
Company 1: 100 employees, buys Scale hyperconverged appliances, does VDI with WorkSpot, uses enterprise thin clients. All hardware is 100% under vendor management and support. All desktops are identical. Backups are to a Datto appliance, hosted. All network gear is Meraki and managed by a VAR. All software is Office 365 and other major SaaS applications. Ratio 100:1
Company 2: 100 employees. Servers are custom built by the IT department. Every desktop is made in house. Each machine is high performance and very unique. Replacement parts are stocked locally and IT does all swaps. Turn over is high. All main applications are written, tested and deployed internally. Mix of hypervisors, operating systems, hardware and apps are used. Backups are done by custom tools. Ratio 100:15
Totally different situations and approaches requiring totally different numbers of IT per user. The IT departments do very different tasks, too.
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DevOps will do the same kind of thing. If you look at servers to system admin ratio we get some crazy things.
Snowflake (no DevOps) the highest ratio I've ever seen is 600:1 servers to admins. The highest I've seen in a normal shop is around 35:1. 100:1 is extreme.
DevOps it is trivial to have 10,000:1.
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@scottalanmiller said in User to IT ratio:
Here is an example of why this makes no sense to use equipment as the guide:
Company 1: 100 employees, buys Scale hyperconverged appliances, does VDI with WorkSpot, uses enterprise thin clients. All hardware is 100% under vendor management and support. All desktops are identical. Backups are to a Datto appliance, hosted. All network gear is Meraki and managed by a VAR. All software is Office 365 and other major SaaS applications. Ratio 100:1
Company 2: 100 employees. Servers are custom built by the IT department. Every desktop is made in house. Each machine is high performance and very unique. Replacement parts are stocked locally and IT does all swaps. Turn over is high. All main applications are written, tested and deployed internally. Mix of hypervisors, operating systems, hardware and apps are used. Backups are done by custom tools. Ratio 100:15
Totally different situations and approaches requiring totally different numbers of IT per user. The IT departments do very different tasks, too.
Yes this is pretty much what I was trying to get at... That it depends because it's totally different from place ti place and industry.
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It's also important to consider all IT resources, not just certain kinds. For example, a company that outsources 100% might accidentally claim zero IT staff. Clearly that isn't right. Everyone outsources something, whether it is outsourcing direct IT or just "hard drive swaps". Nothing is really 100% internal.
So thinking about outsourcing is really important for figuring out what your real ratio is. Every NTG customer gets all of the NTG staff as part of their IT, for example. But not full time for all of them. So it gets super complex.
And then, in the end, the real answer is that the IT staff ratios even when really accurate aren't useful.
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@scottalanmiller said in User to IT ratio:
DevOps will do the same kind of thing. If you look at servers to system admin ratio we get some crazy things.
Snowflake (no DevOps) the highest ratio I've ever seen is 600:1 servers to admins. The highest I've seen in a normal shop is around 35:1. 100:1 is extreme.
DevOps it is trivial to have 10,000:1.
And there's sub categories in there also. I only have approximately 250 machines I manage (but growing), but they are spread over different physical networks and are air gapped. So it's much more work than 200 machines on a flat network with internet access.
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@stacksofplates Good point. Something as simple as the network setup can completely change things.
