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How Much Technical Support is Needed?

Forrester Research Inc. conducted a study in large corporations and found that typical support staff includes one support person for every 50 PC’s at a cost of $142 per PC per year. According to the model, a school district with 1,000 PC’s would need a staff of 20 and a budget of 1.4 million (Microsoft, 1996).

A 1993 study by the Gartner Group on the life cycle cost of a single PC broke the total five-year cost into four subcomponents. Capital costs were 17%, administrative costs were 14%, technical support was 12%, and the largest cost was end-user operations for 57%. In other words, for every $1,000 spent on computers, an additional $5,880 will be spent over five years to support the computer (Gartner Group, 1993). These figures were for large corporations. In school districts many of the tasks identified as administrative or end-user operations, such as software license management, installation and training are the responsibility of the technology support staff, and cost such as loss of productivity is typically not measured with teaching staff.

Project Athena was an educational computing initiative conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in partnership with the IBM Corporation and Digital Equipment Corporation from 1983 to 1991. Under Project Athena a mature, distributed computing environment was developed. Support requirements for distributed computing environments were developed as part of the study.

The approach taken by the study was to determine the human resource skills necessary to support the total environment, and then translate this into real numbers based on full-time employees. The following variables and staffing ratios were established.

• Workstations. Resources are required to install, maintain, track and update.

Resource estimate: W/500, where W is the number of workstations.

• Users. The number of users affects account administration, user training and "how to use" assistance, documentation and configuration services.

Resource estimate: U/1000, where U is the number of users.

• Clusters. Clusters are physically co-located workgroups sharing servers, printers and other peripheral equipment.

Resource estimate: C/15, where C is the number of clusters.

• Supported Applications. The number of applications provided and supported centrally affects the resources required to install, update, support, track and document software licenses.

Resource estimate: A/50, where A is the number of supported applications.

• Vendor Operating Systems and Applications. Operating systems for different platforms all have frequent revisions and updates to install and ensure interoperability with other systems and applications.

Resource estimate: V/1, where V is the number of distinct vendor operating systems and platforms.

• Licenses Required. A license is defined as the right to use the application software for multiple users on multiple platforms.

Resource estimate: L/25, where L is the number of licenses.

To determine the total human resources (HR) required use the following formula (Arfman & Roden, 1992):

HR=W/500 + U/1000 + C/15 + A/50 + L/25 + V

An example of this formula approach to determining appropriate staffing levels would be a school district with 1,000 workstations, 2,000 users, 30 clusters (e.g. school offices), 25 applications supported, 3 operating systems (OS400, Windows 95 and Mac), and licenses required for 25 different software packages. The staffing would be determined as follows.

HR=1000/500 +2000/1000 +30/15 +25/50 + 25/25 +3/1

HR= 2 + 2 + 2 + .5 + 1 + 3 (for a total of 10.5 FTE)

Although telecommunications and network support were not included in this study, similar FTE ratios could be developed to establish appropriate staffing levels for these and other skill sets based on industry or university standards.