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How to Justify IT staff needs for Gov ?

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5 replies

by lmeletlidis

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Here is the situation. Working in a local city Gov. is very difficult, especially when your CEO(city manager) has no pc and doesnt understand technology.

We have a city pop of about 35k residents, 250 city employees, and 5 IT staff members. None of us are dedicated "Admins" we wear so many hats(Exchange Admin, Antivirus admin, SQL/Oracle Dba's etc......)

How can we justify the hiring of additional staff, when "they" just dont understand technology ?

We want to do some type of Visual presentation to prove/show the "Day in the life of an IT guy"
to justify our work load, overworked/underpaid.

Are there any suggestions or perhaps short clips, presentations already done to help ??

Thanks
signed,
Sinking fast.........

5 replies

by loraine

Start with the National League of Cities - they may be able to provide you with information about how other cities of that size are using technology. Then, you could contact the IT departments at those cities for help in building a business case.

Also, in my experience, cities are somewhat competitive with neighboring cities. So, if you can find a city that isn't too horribly much bigger than yours, you might be able to find out what they're doing and hopefully use that as leverage.

You might also find out about the county's system.

by oldefar

If your approach is about your need for more, I don't expect much success.

Instead, focus on tying IT to the business of governing Wintersprings. Everything thing you do needs to link back to an aspect of why the taxpayers are financially supporting the local government. Your job in IT is to provide the local government technology tools to offer more services and better services or the same services for less money.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to work directly with the department heads on how the IT staff can help them accomplish their work. When your effort is important to them, they will do the selling on your behalf to the city manager.

by highlander718

I'm not sure if 250 employees means 250 workstations, phones and related devices, but to be honest, even if that is the case, I don' think you need more than 5 people in the IT dept. Rather than everybody doing everything, I think everybody has to have specific roles (1 manager, 1 LAN Admin, 1 Exchange-Communication-e-mail, 1 application, 1 phones) with each of them beeing able to backup one of the other at least for the basic tasks). I worked in organization with 500 employees, totaly standalone, true "only" 180 workstations and we were 5 people in IT.

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