This is just a "status quo" article. There are occasional spending upticks centered around events (like Y2K) but we typically get our marching orders from the C-level people and are expected to just get it done.
I work for a large university (32k students) and we've got roughly 30 people taking care of about 4,000 computers, 10 important web servers (there are a whole bunch more that no one cares about), Active Directory and Novell Netware (we're in the process of dumping Novell), Groupwise, Magic Service Desk, VMWare, network file storage, multiple POS systems, and a whole bunch of backend stuff that makes all of these systems talk to each other for authentication purposes. That 30 people includes all of our support personnel, network admins, AD admin, programmers, DBA guys, and our email admin. We're also moving from Netware to AD, and from Groupwise to Exchange. If you look at just our desktop support personnel we've got 13 full-time technicians to do desktop level support for 2,000 employees and 32,000 students. We're all looking at this as an opportunity to get good experience to put on the resume and then jump ship for decent money.
Part of that need for maintenance is a need to have good people to do that maintenance. We finally got the school to cough up funding for IT personnel training (we were paying for our own training/certifications), now we just want to get paid more than the high school dropouts working for facilities.