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IT PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT
The help desk function is the public face of the IT organization on a day-to-day basis. Still, many companies struggle to determine the right staffing level for their help desk or to justify additional help desk personnel. This article is an update to our popular study on help desk staffing ratios and provides a more extensive analysis of staffing per user and per desktop, as well as by organization size and industry sector.
The basis for this new analysis is our 2006/2007 IT spending and staffing survey of nearly 200 CIOs and IT executives. Our survey included a question about the number of help desk staff positions, which for our purposes includes employees whose primary job duties are described as "technical support" as well as "help desk." In order to obtain the most accurate help desk ratios, we eliminated organizations that had outsourced any part of their help desk function.
This article provides help desk staffing ratios for the composite sample and provides the same ratios by organization size and industry sector. This allows a firm to benchmark its help desk staffing levels and determine any differences between its own staffing and that of other organizations of similar size and industry. However, the firm will need to do further analysis to understand the causes of these differences. For example, if an organization's help desk is understaffed relative to the benchmarks, it might mean that users are not receiving timely assistance or that employee productivity throughout the organization is low. On the other hand, understaffing the help desk relative to the benchmarks might mean that the firm's IT competence levels are exceptionally high or that the organization's systems are exceptionally reliable, resulting in fewer calls to the help desk.
Likewise, overstaffing relative to the benchmarks may indicate underutilization of help desk personnel-in other words, waste. Alternatively, it may indicate an excessive number of problems in the IT environment that result in an above-average level of help desk incidents. This point will be addressed in more detail later in this study.
Therefore, this study should only be used as a basis for identifying differences between a firm's help desk staffing levels and typical staffing levels of comparable firms. Whether those differences are...