The Cloud and IT Staffing Ratios

According to a ZDNet article (by John Hazard, March 9, 2011) “IT manager jobs to staff jobs in move to the Cloud“:

The typical IT organization usually maintains manager-to-staff ratio of about 11 percent (that number dips to 6 or 7 percent in larger companies), said John Longwell, vice president of research for Computer Economics. The ratio has been volatile for four years, according to the Computer Economics recently released study, IT management and administration staffing ratios. As businesses adjusted to the recession, they first eliminated staff positions, raising the ratio to its peak of 12 percent in 2009. In 2010, businesses trimmed management roles as well, lowering the ratio to 11 percent, Longwell said. But the long term trend is toward a higher ratio of managers-to-staff ratio, he told me.

“Over the longer term, though, I think we will see a continued evolution of the IT organizations toward having more chiefs and fewer Indians as functions move into the cloud or become more automated.”

For a complete copy of the article see: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/it-manager-jobs-to-staff-jobs-in-move-to-the-cloud/45808?tag=content;search-results-rivers

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Predicting IT Staffing Sizes

This is the most comprehensive study that I have seen on IT Staffing.  It was written by Lon D. Gowen, Ph.D., Lead Systems and Software Engineer at the MITRE Corporation.  The paper is entitled “Predicting Staffing Sizes for Maintaining Computer-Networking Infrastructures”.  It was published in 2000.

In this paper Gowan presents benchmark data for the “Number of Users Per FTE of CNI Support” for

1. Systems Administration
2. Help Desk
3. Break/Fix
4. Configuration Management

These numbers were observed in both a DoD and a Private sector enviroment.  Acutal numbers are presented in the paper and are compared to numbers predicted using a COTS modeling tool.

Full paper available at: Predicting Staffing Levels

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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

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