How Big is your IT department
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How big is your IT department. I had a vendor telling me today we don't run very lean and are over staffed in IT. We have a ratio about 1:1,000 (1 IT staff for every 1,000 users). That's counting all developers, technicians, and Systems engineers as myself as well as our director of IT.
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1:1,000 That sounds tight. While working on a Automotive Manufacturer Help Desk, we ran from 6am Monday to 2am Saturday. The HD could handle 18 people at once, though it was rare to have that many people. The site had 4,000 people on it per shift, and company wide (14 plants) had quite a bit of people... I'd almost say that it was closer to 1:2,000 ratio.
But,.. I don't think that 1:1k is all that bad.
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@gjacobse said:
18 people at once, though it was rare to have that many people.
I'm not exactly sure how much our technicians get, of course unless it's an emergency they aren't suppose to call IT they are suppose to put in tickets and we tell them that. Our SLA is 8 business hours.
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Each case is different.. depending on the issue I think they had an SLA of an hour. They pushed about 500 vehicles off the line a shift. So being down was a big deal, they didn't idle the line for much.
Part of their IT department looked at every MS patch and software and all hardware. If there was a risk of failure, the hardware or software was rejected.
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Why are you counting developers? I could have sworn that @scottalanmiller had an article that discussed how they really aren't IT. Even if that is wrong, they probably aren't part of the normal troubleshooting group for support of the system as a whole, or are they?
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@gjacobse said:
Each case is different.. depending on the issue I think they had an SLA of an hour. They pushed about 500 vehicles off the line a shift. So being down was a big deal, they didn't idle the line for much.
We push a lot of manufacturing in one hour, but for the most part it's just manual labor so that part doesn't affect us too much at any of our locations. It's mostly engineering and sales that need things done quick.
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@Dashrender said:
Why are you counting developers? I could have sworn that @scottalanmiller had an article that discussed how they really aren't IT. Even if that is wrong, they probably aren't part of the normal troubleshooting group for support of the system as a whole, or are they?
They support the applications they develop, and troubleshoot issues with that so they are. They technicians just give the tickets straight to them same as the server ones come to me.
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@Jason said:
How big is your IT department. I had a vendor telling me today we don't run very lean and are over staffed in IT. We have a ratio about 1:1,000 (1 IT staff for every 1,000 users). That's counting all developers, technicians, and Systems engineers as myself as well as our director of IT.
So a company of 100,000 people would only have 100 IT people? Um.....
When I was in the Fortune 10, it was more like 1:4
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In the company that I just came from it was something like 1:1
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@Jason said:
@Dashrender said:
Why are you counting developers? I could have sworn that @scottalanmiller had an article that discussed how they really aren't IT. Even if that is wrong, they probably aren't part of the normal troubleshooting group for support of the system as a whole, or are they?
They support the applications they develop, and troubleshoot issues with that so they are. They technicians just give the tickets straight to them same as the server ones come to me.
But since the scope of their support is limited to that software, they aren't full featured like the normal IT staff are. Of course, now one could argue that the IT isn't full featured either since you kick off the support for those apps.. lol
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@Dashrender said:
Why are you counting developers? I could have sworn that @scottalanmiller had an article that discussed how they really aren't IT. Even if that is wrong, they probably aren't part of the normal troubleshooting group for support of the system as a whole, or are they?
Developers definitely are not IT, but often they are lumped in with them in departments.
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Just me...
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Hedgefund I was at was 1:3 with security teams not groups with IT and shadow IT not counted.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Hedgefund I was at was 1:3 with security teams not groups with IT and shadow IT not counted.
Yeah and many of those have had to be bailed out by the government. The financial and banking industries aren't realistic examples to compare to normal fortune 500's.
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My last position was 1:100 here it looks like the ratio is about the same.
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@Jason said:
Yeah and many of those have had to be bailed out by the government. The financial and banking industries aren't realistic examples to compare to normal fortune 500's.
Um, no. Name any hedgefund that was bailed and more importantly which banks needed to be bailed out. I worked in finance at this time and am well aware of the scam that they sold to the public. It was not a bail out, at least the bank that I was at was very healthy and at record profits when the "bail out" as you call it took place.
Calling record profits and the most successful financials in the world "not realistic examples" is just silly. Don't ignore successful IT departments because you dislike the idea of private banking. Few do IT better.
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There is a reason that the government was so keen to nationalize healthy banks.
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If you include developers in the IT department you get crazy figures. Imagine if Microsoft or Google did that. Their IT might be 100:1 (100 IT for every non-IT person.) Clearly the numbers make no sense at all when you mix operations with IT.
That would be like NTG stating their numbers. Our ratio is... infinity since there are zero non-IT department people!
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We are around 1:100 and there are 2 of us.
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