I know we are small, but 100 employees and no IT staff is pretty good. Better than that, we have very good internal systems. Google Apps for Email/Cal; Salesforce.com for SFA; ZenDesk for support; Marketo for marketing, Box for file sharing and few other cloud based systems. Our Engineers are tricked out with the top of line devices, almost everyone else has a MacBook Air. We bought some iPads for our sales people, but all other mobile devices are BYOD. We even have our own internal social network, but we don't use Jive or Sharepoint/Yammer, we use Facebook Private groups to keep connected to one another on a personal level.
So, I started to wonder, why do companies like GE, GM, Exxon need so many staff and are they worried that startups need no IT staff? Probably not, but I thought I would list the reasons that we need no IT staff:
- All our employees are either engineers or young tech savy people. They come with no expectations that IT might help them.
- All our internal systems (and our application) are cloud based. We have no servers. We have no disk drives. We have no people running around to do capacity planning or availability studies. If SF.com and Google Apps are up, then we are up! If they are down, we are down. But they are not down very often, are they?
- The end user departments can administer and configure their own cloud based systems. Marketing does Marketo. Customer Success does ZenDesk, Sales does SF.com, Accounting does their cloud based system. So we don't have legions of people administering systems and if the system is not to the department's liking, they fix it themselves.
- We have no custom internal systems. No one maintaining old code for internal use. No one developing new code for internal use.
Now, I am not suggesting Fortune 500 companies can have no IT staff. Large companies have none of the inherent advantages that a small company like ours has. what is that old saying, "God created the world in seven days, but he did not have a legacy install base." But that dosen't mean their are no lessons to learn. Big company IT should embrace cloud based applications packages and end user departments should "own" them. Mobile BYOD and minimal custom systems are also no brainers. Finally, big company IT should put in place systems that encourage end user self sufficiency and big company employees should not require that IT wipes thier nose at every turn.
I wonder when we will hire our first IT staff? I am betting we can scale to 250 employees without one. I will keep you posted.
Michael, actually what you are saying is that IT is everywhere in your company, instead of being under the responsibility of one team/department. You do not have zero IT staff, but instead 100% of your staff is fully owning IT. Correct?
ReplyDelete@Bernard, sure, but the point isn't really the number of people but the time spent. they spend way less time administering their own servers (hardware and software!) because they don't have any.
ReplyDeletegranted, you're right about devices and user software. it sounds like employees are somewhat responsible for those, and departments for configuring their cloud apps. I expect that builds self sufficiency, though, which empowers them to make improvements they might not otherwise, so the trade-off may be worth it.
@Bernard. I guess one could argue that the departments are spending time on IT, rather than doing their day jobs. But I don't think companies with alot of IT would say that their end users or departments spend zero time on IT, Indeed if you add he time that end users spend explaining their needs to IT people and then testing and accepting solutions, they may be spending more time on IT than my team.
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