I am curious about the availability of computer technical support staff where you work. It used to be back in the late 90’s pretty much every company with a need had an in-house support person or staff to assist with computer related problems. These days it seems like the majority of companies are outsourcing IT support to contract companies.
How do they do it where you work?
Has it changed over time (ie less or more support)?
Has the quality of support gone down, up, or remained the same over the last 6-7 years?
What I’ve found recently, while working as one of those outsourced resources, is this…
After the IT Bust, anyone with less than 100 employees began transitioning to outsourcing.
More recently, that number has moved downwards towards 50-60 employees.
Quality, in terms of available resources, went down, and is now rising.
I lost my job as an outsource resource, due to companies bringing back full time IT staff. I was a “Virutal Admin” and visited companies on an on-call basis, combined with regular proactive/maintenance visits.
The business model for what I was involved with worked during the bust years, but quality/availability suffered for the bottom line. As conditions get better, folks want results faster, and are willing to pay for it.
We outsource some of the specialized stuff like videoconferencing terminals and telephone switches, but regular end-user “desktop” support is all in-house.
Most of our support staff are full-time employees. Speaking of employees, there are roughly 150,000 of us. IIRC, our overall IT department is 6,000 or so employees.
My company has an internal IT department of 4 people. (The company has somewhere around 200 employees at 3 different locations.) One is the department manager/hardware guy, one is hardware/desktop support, and two are programmers for our accounting/inventory systems.
Wow, 6000 IT folks? Do you work for a huge national company?
For anyone who is interested my business has about 140 people, 1 full time tech support/network person (me), two programmers and an IT manager. I just started wondering how other places do it…sounds very similar to here. If a job is too big or outside my knowledge we bring in support.
We have offices in about six states, most in the West, with a National Help Desk in Corona, CA.
We also have IT people at each location. I’ve used the Help Desk solely for password resets, so I dunno how efficient they are, but I will never trust the local people when they came in an told me that my printer could only accept jobs from my computer, despite it being linked to two others in adjoining offices. I wish I knew more about Windows networking, because I would’ve loved to explain it to him.
The company I work for has around 1200 employees. There are around 30 sites. The infrastructure for all these sites (PCs, servers, network equipment) is supported by my team of 5 people.
Having said that, email and proxy server stuff is outsourced. Still, it’s a lot of users for such a small team!
Max.
