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Can your users take care of themselves or do they need and want the administrator to perform even the simplest tasks for them? For example, I have a friend whose users demand that he perform the most basic tasks for them (such as moving their files from one directory to another). How much hand-holding is expected? Some sites have users who are pretty self-sufficient other sites have users who need assistance for everything they do. There are number of different kinds of work that IT teams are often responsible to deliver.
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In a production environment, there is typically significantly more investment make into infrastructure and tools, work is often shared between an engineering group and an operations group, and there are often economies of scale that I only hint at in this paper. There was a nice graph found in the slide deck Impliance: an Information Management Appliance by folks from IBM Research which captured how staffing costs have gone up in comparison to the cost of hardware for enterprise computing. James Hamilton has noted that in mega scale operations, human staff accounts for less than 10% of overall costs. There was a brief article in CIO which demonstrates what happens when you benchmark enterprises against service providers. I discuss some of these issues in my Hints for Operating High Quality Services. This post is primarily about classic enterprise IT staffing… what happens inside a company or a university where IS/IT solutions are delivered. While related, running a production service which is delivering software as service is quite a bit different from enterprise computing. The appropriate number of a staff depends on what the IT organization is responsible for and the level of service expected in each area of responsibility.
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“How many IT staff does an organization need?” is a commonly asked and difficult to answer question.