Look at the maturity model. (Score 1)

I'm a consultant, so I'm in and out of about a dozen companies' IT departments every year. What I've found is that there is this imaginary pendulum that swings between the environment being user-driven vs. being IT department dictated. The pendulum is always somewhere between, and it's always moving in one direction or the other. The more user-driven you are, the more support staff is required to keep everything running because each department is using software of their own choosing that the poor IT department has to get to interact with some other software for some other department (this is common in healthcare and academia). When an organization is highly standardized and driven by IT, you can operate with fewer IT folks and lower costs, but the users are miserable and surly (this is common in manufacturing and government). Thus, the pendulum swings back and forth from comfort to efficiency because you can rarely have both. IT staff size ebbs and flows accordingly, except in some organizations where no one ever leaves or gets fired, but no one updates their skill sets, so they always have to hire more people to take on the new projects that come along (also common in government).