I’ll admit that I was once like that too, but I’ve worked hard to eliminate it. Though, very rarely, when I’m really stressed out, you can see that side of me come out.. but that hasn’t happened in a really long time :-).

I’m proof that even those “techie” IT staff can change and become more personable to the users within the business. All they need to do is develop their softer skills.

What are these soft skills that IT staff should develop? And how can you help them?

Communication Skills

This is at the top of the list. The common complaint is that IT staff are unable to communicate effectively. I disagree though. IT staff are able to communicate very well; they are unable to communicate with people who are not their peers.

IT staff need to learn to communicate effectively to the layman, by understanding their audience and thinking about how they may understand the topic that they are trying to communicate.

There are many ways that you can help staff members become better communicators, whether written or verbally.

• Suggest joining Toastmasters, or send them to a Dale Carnegie course.
• Have internal sessions where you give each person a chance to speak about something non-technical that is important to them.
• Give constructive feedback on written works they’ve done.

For a member of IT learning to communicate with users is not always easy, but another skill can help…

Empathy

Empathy is the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions. I’m not at all saying that members of the IT department have no empathy; if they didn’t have empathy they’d all be sociopaths (although some may argue that they are).

What I am saying is that sometimes the IT staff has problems understanding the experiences from the users’ point of view. By helping them to become more empathetic, IT staff can relate to user challenges, and will hopefully treat them better (I make no promises).

You may sometimes hear about this as “Emotional Intelligence” as coined by Daniel Goldman. There are courses on emotional intelligence, although I believe this is something that requires longer term coaching.

Someone needs to point out to the IT person what they did, and simply ask, “How would you feel if so and so happened to you or to a loved one?” or “How do you expect that the other person feels about so and so?”.

You have to get them into the other person’s shoes so they can begin to relate to it.

Of course the person doing the coaching should be empathetic too, otherwise it’d just be a case of the blind leading the blind.

It may take some time, but after a while, the person will show improvement. Granted, they may not be the most compassionate person in the world, but they would certainly be more empathetic than they were before.

Critical Thinking

IT staff tend to be very logical thinkers. We follow a well defined thinking style to resolve issues. It is indeed one of our strengths, and is also found in areas such as engineering and other physical sciences.

However, such thinking style often results in rigid beliefs and thoughts. What we need to grow is our “Critical Thinking” skills.

Critical thinking is the process of critically assessing our thinking, and finding ways to improve it.

A definition I like from the Critical Thinking Community:

Critical thinking is that mode of thinking — about any subject, content, or problem — in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it.

Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking. It presupposes assent to rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command of their use. It entails effective communication and problem-solving abilities, as well as a commitment to overcome our native egocentrism and sociocentrism.

We must therefore revisit our thoughts and beliefs and discover if they are right. Especially in this fast changing field, what we once knew, may not be true anymore or even relevant.

Developing critical thinking is a process, and there are many books and tools out there to help you develop it. One of my favourite books is “Why Didn’t I Think of That? Think the Unthinkable and Achieve Creative Greatness” by Charles McCoy Jr., but there are tons of other books out there, such as “Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius” by Michael Michalko (which I also recommend), that are worth investigating.

The development of critical thinking may work best in a group setting, so set time aside for group activities where you can help your entire team become better thinkers.

In Summary

There are other skills that may help, such as presentation skills, but the three I’ve listed would help your team go a long way.

IT staff often see their technical skills as the be all and end all of what they need in order to succeed. But I’ve seen time and time again, where not having the right mix of softer skills truly hampers the growth of very talented people.

These skills just don’t make you a better member of the IT Staff… it makes you a better person.

And it’s never too late to learn to be a better person.

Original article: 3 Soft Skills that every member of IT should have'">The softer side of IT 3 Soft Skills that every member of IT should have

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These are businesses not using IT to its fullest potential, and are therefore lowering their own businesses potential.

IT has the potential to change the way businesses operate, no matter the size of operation. Here are some ways.

1. Production visibility

Have you ever needed to know what the exact sales figure was at a particular time of the day but you couldn’t because the cashiers weren’t scheduled to perform their daily tallies yet? Or how about how many orders were shipped, or calls were made, or customers who returned items? If you have a manual system, there is no way to know this until someone goes through and tallies the figures to give to you.

With a computerised system you can have these figures at the tips of your fingers. You can have a running dashboard with how your production metrics are looking and how many sales were closed, or pending.

How much will such metrics help you in growing your business? How can such figures help you make better business decisions?

When you use data and statistics to guide business decisions, rather than gut instinct, you make better decisions. (You can read about this in Chapter 21 of the excellent book, “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman).

2. Enterprise Management

Don’t let the term “enterprise management” turn you off; just because enterprise is there, doesn’t mean that it’s only for big businesses. Enterprise means that it can tie in all aspects of your organisation – the financial, human resource, support, administrative and sales information – into a single cohesive mix. This may not be a single product, but products that allow access to each other in some way that you can automate much of the workflows within your organisation.

Small businesses can use this to help them manage the flow of orders from sales to warehouse. To understand where weaknesses are in the process and help improve it.

In larger businesses, enterprise management help a great deal because the size of the organisation adds many barriers to communication. But imagine being able to have a system in place where you can hire an employee and an automatic message is generated and sent to IT for IT resources, security for passes and communications for internal memos for new employees. When the employee comes in, his pass is waiting, workstation is ready and everyone is already expecting him. How will that increase his morale? How will such communication improve the workplace?

3. User Mobility

Many businesses have become a prison. To get any work done, you have to be at a workstation, punching away at a computer. If you are away from your desk and someone asks for some info, you may have to wait until you reach t othe desk to get it for them, by which time you may have forgotten about the request to begin with.

Wireless networks (WiFi) and mobile data (3G, 4G and LTE) allows us to be always online. We can debate the effect that has on us in terms of work/life balance, but I won’t get into that at this time. The fact is, that simply adding wireless access to your internal network allows users to roam the floor easily.

Simple changes to office design by placing standing round tables can allow ad-hoc, standing meetings, which helps faster decision making, since who would want to stay standing up for more than 15 minutes?

Internal wireless networks can help in many other ways. Location tags allow you to track assets within a building. Wireless barcode scanners can help asset managers account for fixed assets, and warehouse attendants to track and find inventory. And new standards allow for network access greater than 100MBit/s, which many wired LANs have installed. You can theoretically achieve greater than 1Gbit/s, but it’s not practically feasible at the moment.

Mobile data access using cellular providers open greater avenues. You can make final touches to a document on the road, get real time updates of performance metrics of the business, and sales can close deals and place orders on the road, rather than having to wait until they reach the office.

How can mobility help your business? The options are wide open.

4. Customer Management

Do you know who are your best customers? Do you know when last you spoke to any of your customers? If a salesperson leaves, will another person be able to continue where that last one left off?

Sales is mainly about relationships, but that does not have to be with the salesperson alone, but also with the company. You shouldn’t have to wait for a particular salesperson to be available to provide answers, but information should always be available about and for your customers.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software deals with all customer information, not just sales, but the contact information, the touches (the times you contacted, spoke, met, etc), and any other information that may be relevant.

Using CRM systems, you also reduce the risk of dropping the ball if a salesperson leaves, as all the information related to the customer account should be available within the system.

CRM systems are suitable for both large and small businesses alike, as the sales process is not all that different between them.

How will better relationships and interactions with your customers help your business?

5. Project Management and Collaboration

One of the top reasons for projects failing is the lack of user communication. Tasks are forgotten, information is lost, and other stakeholders are unaware of what exactly is happening.

Using a computerised project management or collaboration system, you can better manage projects ensuring that they don’t fail, or overrun. This is beyond using Microsoft’s Project software. I’m talking about an entire system where the team can collaborate and communicate about tasks and deliverables in real time.

Many online systems are available that are pretty affordable for even small businesses, and easy to scale as well. Using such systems can ensure that tasks are done, all information is kept within a single system, and all stakeholders are aware of what is happening.

What impact will improving the success rates of projects have on your business?

6. Knowledge Management

We now live in a knowledge based society, where employees are called Knowledge Workers. This means that the employee’s worth is more than the value of his physical labour, but also his skills, talents, and what he knows.

Such knowledge is truly valuable to businesses, and intellectual property is something that they all try to protect at great costs.

As such, companies try to capture knowledge in a variety of ways such as patents and whitepapers. But even normal day to day knowledge can be captured and used within an organisation to improve efficiency.

You can build an internal, private website called an Intranet that has loads of information available for all employees. You can also experiment with employees being able to add and contribute information to the Intranet, such as allowing internal blogs or wikis, so employees can write about what they learned.

IT allows us to spread knowledge around and grow it. As the saying goes, if I have a dollar and I give you a dollar, we still only have a dollar between us. But if I have an idea and I share it with you, we now have two ideas.

More?

This is only a subset of ways that IT can help your business. My intention is to share it should you not have thought of it before. I am sharing my ideas in the hope that it inspires more ideas from you.

What other ideas do you have? Care to share?

Original article: 6 Ideas How IT Can Help Businesses

©2025 Interxect Services Limited. All Rights Reserved.

There is a director who works in the same organisation with my client who often expresses his disagreement with the size of the IT department there. The organisation is small with about 90 total employees, while the IT department has 7 employees including the IT director. In his view, the IT department should have no more that 3 users.

I’m not sure where he got that idea from – that there is some standard formula that determines the ratio of IT staff to total employees – and from the comments in the forum, it seems that many people have that same question on their minds.

So let me answer that question for you: There is no standard for IT staff to total employee ratio, nor should there be any.

Industry Averages

The Gartner 2013 Key IT Metrics Report shows that the Cross-Industry average of IT Full Time Employees as a percentage of Total Employees is 5%. In the Banking and Financial services sector, the average is 9.6%, and in the insurance sector is 11.7%. Again, this is the average, which means that some organisations in the sector have less than the average, and some have more.

I dislike the use of industry averages for decision making as it implies striving for mediocrity. In my view, any decision on the size of the IT department using industry averages is stupid and short-sighted. Do you look at industry averages of revenues and say, “our revenues were $2 million, but the industry average is $1 million. Let’s cut back!”? No! So why do the same with staffing requirements?

How Should You Size IT

IT staffing requirements, as for any staffing requirement, all depend on the needs of the organisation.

Business Growth

Is the organisation growing? Then you may find that support issues are not being resolved in a timely manner, and you may need more staff. If more services are being brought on-stream, then again you may either need additional staff or skills to support that service and the necessary infrastructure.

Your staff will also be required to have the time necessary to figure out how to grow the services to meet the growing business, which means that they can’t be 100% allocated to fighting fires, that is, only addressing support issues. You may even find that it’s not so much the quantity of staff that’s important, but the quality. You will need staff that know how to get you where you want to go.

Is the business shrinking? If it’s because of competition, then you may need to invest more in IT – both in services and in skills – to improve your competitiveness. If it’s because of market or environmental conditions, then that’s a more complex matter, and and solutions vary on a case by case basis.

IT Dependence

What about your services? If your IT services is critical to your business and highly utilised, then having a high number of staff may be critical to keeping your business going. For some organisations, even outsourcing certain functions is out of the question because of the value of the service being provided.

If, on the other hand, your IT services are not that critical to the business, then a low number of staff may be required, and you may be able to outsource much of the support to outside parties.

What about your infrastructure? If you are outsourcing the IT infrastructure, such as using a cloud service or another managed service, you may find that you need less staff.

Data Security

Is your data highly valuable? Well, all data is valuable, but some is more valuable than others. Your business may consider that financial and customer data is important and everything else is not. In this case, you may find that a small number of staff is required to keep that data secure.

However, if you have much more data to secure, such as in the banking sector, you need a larger amount of staff to ensure least privilege, and to have the required checks and balances in place.

IT Staff Utilisation

Does your IT staff have too much to do? If you have IT staff that’s 100% allocated to tasks at all times, then there’s a problem whenever that person needs to go on vacation or is sick. Ensure that you have redundancy so that work can continue even of a person is absent.

However, if you have staff that spends most of the day doing nothing, then perhaps you need to relook your staffing needs, or get better employees. Even in downtime, employees can use that time to better themselves by learning new skills, or figuring out new ways that IT can help the business.

Conclusion

Of course, you may never get a right number. I’ve gone to a lot of places where the IT department never seems to have enough people, but a deeper look showed a number of inefficiencies, which also tend to worsen as more people join the fray. As they say, too many cooks spoil the broth. It’s important to always appropriately analyse the situation before making a decision.

In summary, choosing the number of IT staff in your business simply because of some arbitrary ratio – industry average or otherwise – is unwise. You should decide the number based on the needs of the business – growth, services, infrastructure and security.

Properly staffing your IT department can go a long way to ensuring business success in the long run.

Original article: Is there a standard ratio of IT Staff to Total Employees?'">How Large an IT Staff Do You Need Is there a standard ratio of IT Staff to Total Employees?

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