IT Salary and Staffing, Using Hard Data to Slim Down Your IT Department

When the economy is slipping and profits are dipping, businesses often turn to cost cutting measures as a way to ensure continued profitability. And one of the largest "cost centers" in most organizations is Information Technology.

Consuming a whopping 40%-50% of the IT budget is the cost of personnel, which means one of the easiest ways to tighten the corporate belt is to cut back on IT staff. But how? Eliminating the wrong positions can mean reducing critical services or losing key technical capabilities altogether, at a time when businesses cannot afford to lose ground in the tech wars.

Rather than blindly hacking away at your IT staff, make smart choices about what to eliminate, what to enhance and how to compensate that staff competitively. Using staffing benchmarks and comparative salary data can allow an organization to make those difficult decisions intelligently to ensure that the IT department is sufficiently staffed and appropriately compensated.

BENCHMARKING YOUR IT STAFF SIZE

Benchmarking your staffing levels refers to comparing the make up of your IT staff to other, similar organizations. The best place to start when looking for data to compare your staffing levels against is other companies in the same industry. The IT department at a technology services company will look very different from the IT department at a law firm, for example. Look to IT publications that focus on your industry, or to IT staffing surveys that cover a number of industries.

Key data points will help you understand appropriate IT staffing levels. Look for such statistics as "Number of Users Per Help Desk Staff" or "Number of PCs per IT Manager". These numbers will help you identify any bloat in your IT staff.

Armed with hard data on the recommended IT staff size and make-up, you can scale back where you are over staffed or identify key hires. The data will help you justify your staff to business management and demonstrate that you are taking IT costs seriously.

HOW MUCH IS A PROGRAMMER WORTH?

The second and equally important component to auditing your IT staff is to ensure that compensation levels are high enough to retain key staff, but not so high that you are wasting money.

There isn't an easy answer to the question above. How much a programmer is worth depends on a number of factors, such as where the position is located, what skills the programmer brings to the table and what his or her responsibilities will actually be on the job. Again, having hard data will help you make the right decisions about how to pay your employees for their unique backgrounds and positions.

Start with free online salary calculators which can give you a broad stroke perspective on the salary range for a given position. Remember, geography matters a lot. The cost of living is higher in New York City than in Tulsa, and salaries will be higher too. When it really matters, you should look to IT salary surveys that actively track compensation for various IT positions and skills across multiple geographic areas.

Using hard data and industry-specific benchmarks, you can develop a lean IT department that has all the skills your organization needs to remain competitive at a cost business management can afford.

Article Source: http://www.rightbiz.com

Shannon Armstrong is a research specialist at InfoEdge.com, which specializes in making high-level IT salary surveys and staffing benchmarks available on the internet.

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