I am the I.T. Manager (and the ONLY person in the “I.T Department) for a transportation and logistics company that is growing very rapidly. When I first started working for this company two years ago, there were 10 users and 1 location. They needed 8am-5pm Mon-Fri systems availability. There were 10 workstations and 1 “server”.
Fast forward to today. There are over 80 users and 5 locations scattered across the US. A sixth location and an additional 10 users will be added within 6 months. We have 6 servers, over 80 workstations, numerous laptops & PDAs, and numberous network printers. The company now requires 24x7x365 systems availability. I am still the only I.T. person in the entire company. When I tell management that I need help, they put me on the back burner. If systems aren’t available when they need to be, or if I need to be in two places at once and obviously can’t be, I get threatened with termination. I am very good at my job, with over 13 years of experience in I.T. However, I can’t keep up with the company’s growth anymore and I have to figure out how to get management to understand that we need additional I.T. staff.
My questions are these: How many I.T. staff should we have, what positions, and how do I convince management of this? Call volume is fairly high during the day, but extremely minimal at night. I don’t think I can justify having someone work evenings or nights due to this, but it would be nice to have someone on call other than me sometimes. I can’t even use my vacation and sick time! Help!
