Tag: IT

From Slashdot: Ratio of IT Dept Workers to Overall Employees?

“I was recently talking to a friend about the Fortune 100 company she works for in IT. She told me the company has 35,000 employees, including over 5,000 IT employees — and it’s not a web firm. It has numerous consultants doing IT work as well. To me, from a background where my last job had 50 IT employees and 1,000 total, a 1-in-7 ratio of IT employees seems extremely high. Yet she mentioned even simple changes to systems/software take over six months. So, what ratio does your company have, and what is reasonable? How much does this differ by industry?

More information needed, please.

What does the company do?
For example, a cleaner in Pixar might consider there to be a lot of IT workers in the company. Similarly someone from the Human Resources department in Apple might see everyone in R&D as a form of IT workers. You don’t have to be a ‘web firm’ to require a lot of technology workers – computing workstations permeate every business these days.

Simple changes?
And if you have divisions of people, does it not make sense to roll out software or hardware, even “simple changes” to a department at a time (precluding the possibility of annoying dependencies, e.g. every upgrade to Microsoft Office I’ve ever worked through). If computers have anything to do with your company’s bottom line then you have a fiscal responsibility to stage changes slowly and always have a backout plan. Seems amazing but the $BIG_COMPANY didn’t have a process for staging changes to make sure there was no ‘interactive’ effect of the myriad small changes being made.

Ratios?
What does a ratio mean? When I first worked in enterprise IT, every person in the company (bar cleaners, machine operators and shipping personnel) sat at some sort of computer. The ratio of IT worker to ’employee’ was about 1:150. If you only included the people who used a computer in their job the ratio was probably closer to 1:100. (And I guess it’s notable that it went to 1:50 when we did the migration from UNIX/Mac to Windows).

So?
Ratios are nonsense unless you have an idea of what the business actually does. And the people you see with computers may not be IT workers in the traditional sense – but they may be skilled or knowledge workers in another sense.

CIO Magazine writes:

“My CIO is clueless.” These are words you don’t want to hear if you want to earn the respect of your application development professionals. So how do you avoid being a clueless CIO? Steer clear of these behaviors:

1. The CIO is a control nut.
2. The CIO is aloof.
3. The CIO gulps vendor Kool-Aid.
4. The CIO is a technical dinosaur.
5. The CIO is ubergeeky.
6. The CIO thinks changes can happen overnight.
7. The CIO doesn’t know the difference between resources and talent.
8. The CIO collaborates to death.
9. The CIO spends all of his time trying to get promoted to CEO.

A couple of years ago I had a debate during an awards ceremony (I was there to pick up, he was there to hand over) with a CIO regarding the utility and support of phones, handheld computers, PDAs and the like. He was adamant that everyone in the organisation should have the same hardware and software and there was no room for flexibility. I tried, over the lunch, to explain that if I can’t get my Outlook appointments synced to my phone, then I’ll miss meetings because I don’t sit at my desk all day waiting for appointment reminders to appear. He believed that the support burden of handhelds would far outweigh the advantages and it helped me realise that there are two kinds of IT folk in the world:

• Those who think their job is to help their clients
• Those who think their clients existence is to provide them with a job

I’ve met far too many of the latter. Doing support back in the late 90s for a very large population without the benefit of remote control tools or backoffice administration tools helped me realise what the support burden was of ‘helping people’.

It’s not a burden. It may be a job and you may get paid for it, but it’s not a burden. A burden is, in my opinion, an unnecessary weight on your workload. This may be due to poor procedure, a lack of automation or poor technology choices. My justification for this opinion is that I get asked for a lot of support when I’m sitting at home and just happen to be on email or instant messenger. I’ve always done my best to help people, whether this is over IM, email, Skype, Twitter.

CIOs need to remember what their function is. In a large enough company they are the manager or managers and not sitting in a lofty position preparing to rain crap down on their peons (been there). It’s not the job of the CIO to use the IT team as their personal and home IT resource and drag them away from their productive work to sort out a problem with a printer in their home (done that). Especially during working hours. The CIO should be working to find ways to make the Information Technology of the company work better and smoother. This means making sure your talented underlings attend the briefings and go on the fact-finding tours, they’re not an excuse for you to get out of the country (got the T-shirt) You then should take the opinions of the team and not just the opinion of the attractive saleswoman from Dell. The CIO needs to straddle the divide between the business and the IT department at the executive level. This means, for the most part, being knowledgeable about the reasons for things, defending the actions of the team who might know better about the IT environment and pushing for real change that will benefit everyone.

[EDITED due to stupidity]