Information Technology Operation Benchmarks – University

A “Information Technology Operation Benchmarks Report” created by Nick Ganesan, CIO/Associate Vice-Chancellor for ITTS at Fayetteville State University.  The report contains detailed benchmark data for:

1. IT Budget Profile
2. IT Budget per IT User
3. IT Budget as a Percentage of Institutional Budget
4. IT Users to IT Staff ratio
5. IT Staff to Number of PCs – Ratio
6. Staffing Profile by service area
7. PCs to IT User Ratio
8. Central IT Support Percentage
9. Staff ratio by service areas

The benchmark data is against IT services at universities located in the United States.

Location of Report: http://www.kfupm.edu.sa/sict/ictc/related%20documents/IT%20Benchmark/Fayetteville%20State%20University%20IT_Benchmarks_ver1.pdf

Local Copy: IT Benchmark for Universities – Fayetteville State University Report

Benchmark Cloud Computing

Powered by PathView Cloud, the Cloud Provider Scorecard rates the performance of leading cloud providers to and from numerous locations throughout North America. The scores, 100 being the best, represent a proprietary scoring algorithm of network performance characteristics – such as capacity, jitter, latency and packet loss – between the provider and these locations.  The cloud provider offering the best performance to each city is indicated by the colored circles on the map. Cloud providers are monitored continuously and the scorecard is updated daily.  Cloud providers include AWS, GoGrid, Hosting.com, Rackspace and Salesforce.com.

Source: http://www.apparentnetworks.com/CPC/Scorecard.aspx

IT Staffing Model

TechRepublic has provided a spreadsheet model to help you determine the right number of people in your IT shop.  In their approach, they focus on one category of staff at a time.  In each category, a few key questions are used to focus the analysis:

1. Programmers

• Is there a separation between application development and support?
• Do programmers work on multiple business applications?
• Are external clients supported, and if so, is there customized code for individual clients?
• Are major investments needed in software development of critical business applications?
• How big is the programming backlog, and what type of changes are being requested?
• Can the key business processes be accomplished better and more economically with a third-party solution?
• If you have external clients, can programmers be dedicated to and billed to specific clients?

2. Business application analysts and trainers

• Are new applications planned?
• Does the company support the installation of software for external clients?
• How knowledgeable are the departments and clients in the use of their business applications?

3. Help Desk specialists

• Are infrastructure calls separated from business application calls, or is the Help Desk support functions for both combined?
• How responsive do you need to be?
• Does the Help Desk have sound escalation procedures?
• What’s the level of client satisfaction for IT support?
• Is the response rate to solve user issues sufficient?
• Do you have a tracking system to monitor support calls, trends, and responsiveness?
• How many calls is the Help Desk handling now?
• What is the percentage of local users (as opposed to remote)?
• Does the company require 24/7 staffing of the Help Desk?

4. Network administrators

• Are major changes or enhancements planned/needed for the infrastructure?
• Is an experienced architect of the network in place?
• What has been the history of implementing infrastructure changes?
• Is there an infrastructure strategic plan?
• Is a change management process in place?

5. Desktop support specialists

• What are the company growth plans?
• Are major changes planned/needed in the desktop hardware/software?
• What is the percentage of remote users (other office buildings, cities, etc.)?
• Is the response rate to solve desktop issues sufficient?

6. Data Center operations staff

• Does the Data Center require 24/7 operation?
• What are the requirements for the Data Center?
• Is a “lights out” operation possible?
• Is the Data Center secure?

Using this model IT staff needs are based upon a number of factors, including the workload, anticipated needs, current capability of the staff, and maturity of the company. As much as possible, we try to quantify all the variables in each set of issues. Ultimately, it’s a judgment call based on the variable data, the level of support that you need to provide, and your experience in managing IT. If you can quantify the variables that affect levels of support, you’ll be much better equipped to determine your true needs.

A full description of this approach can be found at: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-1061079.html?tag=e106

A copy of the IT Staffing Model in an Excel spreadsheet can be found here:  http://downloads.techrepublic.com.com/5138-6321-730024.html

Forrester: CIO Benchmark Survey

On November 17, 2009 Forrester Research reported the preliminary results of a CIO benchmark survey.   These results indicate:

1. Within a given IT group, the number of people in ‘applications’ is higher than the number of people in IT infrastructure.  40% of IT people are in applications and 30% are in infrastructure.
2. The number of people working on enterprise projects varies a lot, but in nearly all cases is a significant part of the IT organization at an average of 10% in medium sized shops (50 to 300 people in IT) and 5% in large shops (> 300 people within IT).

Source: http://advice.cio.com/forrester_research/are_it_benchmarks_useful

ITIL Hourly Bill Rates

Hotgigs.com reports ITIL Hourly Bill Rates

High: $150.00 per hour

Mid: $137.50 per hour

Low: $125.00 per hour

HotGigs Inc. delivers web-based solutions and services that help companies efficiently source and manage their contract workforce. Our Contract Workforce Solutions build upon the HotGigs Staffing Exchange, which facilitates the connection and interaction of hiring companies, staffing suppliers and independent consultants.

Source: http://www.hotgigs.com/rates/skill/ITIL-hourly-consultant-bill-rates/

Data Center – Staffing Levels

Coastal Technologies, developer of HELP!Desk software, has published guidelines for determining the number of technicians needed to staff a support center.

Establishing the proper support staff to customer ratio is essential for any organization. Each of the factors in the table below has an effect on the staff size. Assume a starting ratio 75 to 100 customers per analyst (75:1 to 100:1), then adjust the ratio for the following conditions:

Consideration	Support Staff Levels
Experienced support staff	Decrease
Customer handling expertise	Decrease
Large number of products to support	Increase
Multiple shifts and weekends	Increase
Support staff possesses knowledge of the organization’s business	Decrease
Internal support only	Decrease
External support only	Increase
Both internal and external support	Increase
Service Level Agreements negotiated	Decrease
Budget concerns	Decrease*
Multiple platforms to support (i.e. Web, PC, Mainframe, Mac)	Increase
Automated tools in place	Decrease
Experienced support center management	Decrease
Support center has good reputation in company	Decrease
Center has bad reputation	Increase
Multiple support center locations	Increase
Quality Assurance or Quality Control responsibility	Increase
Proactive support philosophy	Increase**
Support center has additional responsibilities not listed above	Increase

* = A staffing decrease may be required to meet your budget, but too small a staff can create bigger problems later on – dissatisfied customers, excessive stress, technician burnout and high turnover to name a few.

**= Initially, proactive support requires more staff per customer. The trend is reversed down the line as you should see a decrease in customer problems.

Source: http://coastaltech.com/hd-staff.htm

Proportion of Software Testers to Developers

Cem Kaner, a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, has done research on the ratio of software testers to software developers. His presentation entitled “Managing the Proportion of Testers to Other Developers” is partially based on a meeting of the Software Test Managers Roundtable (STMR 3) in Fall 2001.

FIT

The study found that:
– There were very small ratios (1-to-7 and less) and very
large ratios (5-to-1).
– Some of each worked and some of each failed.
– Many remembered successful projects with ratios lower than 1-to-1 more favorably than successful projects with larger ratios.

Read the paper to find out why is there such a range of successful ratios, and why test managers be happy with relatively low ratios?

See: http://www.kaner.com/pdfs/pnsqc_ratios.pdf and http://www.kaner.com/

Benchmarking File Systems and Storage

Avishay Traeger from the IBM Haifa Research Lab and Erez Zadok from Stony Brook University are raising awareness of issues relating to proper benchmarking practices of file and storage systems.  They hope that with greater awareness, standards will be raised, and more rigorous and scientific evaluations will be performed and published.

In May 2008 they published a paper in the ACM Transactions on Storage entitled “A Nine Year Study of File System and Storage Benchmarking’” in which they surveyed 415 file system and storage benchmarks from 106 papers that were published in four highly-regarded conferences (SOSP, OSDI, USENIX, and FAST) between 1999 and 2007.  They found that most popular benchmarks are flawed, and many research papers used poor benchmarking practices and did not provide a clear indication of the system’s true performance.  They have provided a set of guidelines that they hope will improve future performance evaluations. An updated version of the guidelines is available.

Traeger and Zadok have also set up a mailing list for information on future events, as well as discussions.  More information can be found on their File and Storage System Benchmarking Portal
http://fsbench.filesystems.org/.

Help Desk Staffing Ratios by Size and Industry

An ongoing survey by Computer Economics is investigating the level of staffing organizations allocate to their help desks. To date, more than 300 companies of varying size, spanning a wide group of industry sectors, have participated in the ongoing study. The study investigates staffing in terms of the ratio between help desk employees and the total number of employees supported by the help desk.

The study has found that the median staffing ratio is 1.3% (in other words, 13 help desk support personnel are supporting 1,000 company employees, or one help desk headcount for every 76.9 company employees). At the 25th percentile, the ratio is 0.4% and at the 75th percentile, the ratio is 2.8%. As the help desk is usually an overhead function, these moderate ratios show that most organizations are applying their budgets prudently. A median ratio of 1.3% provides an acceptable level of support to the operating staff. The study results indicate that organizational size and industry sector will typically have an impact on the ratio of help desk personnel to total employees.

Source: AFCOM – http://www.afcom.com/The_Association/ResourceCenter/Data_Center_Management/Help_Desk_Staffing.asp

Apache Server – Requests per Second

This post on www.ilovebonnie.net documents some impressive system performance improvements by the addition of Squid Cache (a caching proxy) and APC Cache (opcode cache for PHP).
* Apache is able to deliver roughly 700% more requests per second with Squid when serving 1KB and 100KB images.
* Server load is reduced using Squid because the server does not have to create a bunch of Apache processes to handle the requests.
* APC Cache took a system that could barely handle 10-20 requests per second to handling 50-60 requests per second. A 400% increase.
* APC allowed the load times to remain under 5 seconds even with 200 concurrent threads slamming on the server.
* These two caches are easy to setup and install and allow you to get a lot more performance out of them.

The post has an in-depth discussion and a number of supporting charts. The primary point is how simple it can be to improve performance and scalability by adding caching.

Source: http://www.ilovebonnie.net/2009/07/14/benchmark-results-show-400-to-700-percent-increase-in-server-capabilities-with-apc-and-squid-cache/