How much IT Staff Do I need?

I've been working on the issue of staffing IT departments in libraries. There's a wide range of how it is done ranging from having an in-house IT group (or person) to using the County or City IT Department (which probably considers the library a low priority) to outsourcing with a local tech support company to asking the Reference Librarian's grandchild to come in to help once in a while.

Regardless of how you do it...the question of how many is the right number seems to be consistently under-estimated. Toward that end, I've worked up a spreadsheet that will help you determine how many FTEs your library should have supporting the network and PCs. It is based on a product developed originally by IBM and Digital Equipment Corp. and then further developed and customized by the Michigan Technology Training Resources (read more).

After you enter your numbers in the orange "Your Data Here" column, the spreadsheet will tell you the "Number of Technical Staff Needed." By IT Staff I am not including webmasters...rather, just the people keeping the network safe and secure, software properly configured and running without problems, and all the PCs (staff and public) running 99.9% of the time.

Give the spreadsheet a try and give me your feedback. This is Rev9 and it has been tested with smaller systems. Not sure how it will hold up with the real big systems. Let me know. Lori.Ayre(at)galecia.com

By making this tool available, I'm trying to give the IT staff something to take to their director (who may not understand what it really takes to do the job effectively). I know you IT staffers out there already know. I see so many under-IT-staffed libraries, I'm hoping to help pave the way to top level management who need to bump up their budget to account for what it really takes to run the IT Department in a library today.