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.