Hi Folks,
Excuse my ignorance of not even knowing which discussion to post this to.
I need some help and hope you can either offer some suggestions from your personal experience or direct me to sites where I may research the topic.
I work for a medium sized non-profit enterprise that essentially does not believe in having an IT department. We have a bandaided LAN of PCs, Macs, some of which is pretty much of a mess.
There is one, ONE poor guy that inherited the mess and now he has our new VoIP phone system to deal with too. He has way too much work to do and way too little salary for his efforts.
My department has about 25 employees. I take care of our part of the LAN, our hardware, and our software. I was not trained as an IT person and actually I have two other hats I wear at work. I inherited the computer tech role in my department as I have the most knowledge, experience and mainly I have the interest and desire to deal with the machines whereas no one else does.
My problem is that my attempts to be allocated at least a minimum amount of hours a week to do maintenance and solve problems has pretty much fallen on deaf ears.
Most of the folks here have the naive notion that computers should run perfectly all the time without any care and are incredibly shocked that a new computer would have any problems at all – let alone our old ones.
But enough of my whining. What I want to know is what is the rule of thumb for calculating either percent of a company’s budget for IT or some method of calculating hours per week per machine – or whatever. I know the information is out there, I just don’t know where to start looking.
I need to present some justification to my bosses as to why they should spend money on preventative maintenance and how much they should spend.
I would be extremely grateful for any suggestions you can give me.
Thanks so much,
Chris