Online sales continue to grow, and investments in cloud technologies are placing new demands on web systems, yet the percentage of the IT staff dedicated to web and e-commerce functions dropped sharply this year in sympathy with the general retreat of data center personnel.
Figure 1 from our study, Web/E-Commerce Staffing Ratios, shows that the percentage of the IT staff dedicated to web and e-commerce development and operations stands at 2.7% at the median for the composite sample, down from 3.3% the prior year.
Our definition of web/e-commerce staff includes personnel who are responsible for the creation and maintenance of websites, intranets, and e-commerce systems. We also include personnel who manage EDI systems. Typical job titles in this category include webmaster, web designer, web administrator, web programmer, web developer, Internet specialist, and EDI specialist. The category does not include personnel supporting communications and messaging systems, however.
Due to a change in our classification system, we only have two years of data for this category. That makes it difficult to determine whether this decline is part of a short-term cyclical movement, perhaps reflecting a pick up in hiring in areas such as help desk, or whether it is part of a larger, secular trend that includes a decline in data center and server support staffing in general.
While many IT organizations outsource all or part of their web operations, the study excludes organizations that do not staff these positions and makes adjustments to staffing levels for those that partially outsource the function. In the full study, we benchmark web/e-commerce staffing with three ratios: web/e-commerce staff as a percentage of the IT staff, users per web/e-commerce staff member, and applications per web/e-commerce staff member. We provide metrics by organize size and by sector.
This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, Web/E-Commerce Staffing Ratios. The full report is available at no charge for Computer Economics clients, or it may be purchased by non-clients directly from our website (click for pricing).
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