What is your IT-department to staff ratio?

This is a topic that may be rather political but it related to system administration still...how many people do you have supporting your users in your IT department? We have three people supporting something near 1500 systems and around 2400 people and a recent question was raised about why we have long times to get systems replaced, repaired, work orders fulfilled, etc. along with the system admin duties of maintaining the servers (mail, proxy, filters, VOIP, wireless, backup, etc.)

Does anyone have numbers on what the "best practices" average is of support people to employees in an organization?

EDIT:...from some of the answers that are appearing I'm starting to feel depressed...

I would say that the ratio is about right when things get done in a reasonable amount of time, where "reasonable" is defined by management. If you're the one managing the IT department there, you get to balance the budget for the department against the users who complain that things aren't getting done fast enough. If not, then someone else has apparently decided that the needs of your users isn't as important as keeping the books in the black.

But you want to know our ratio? I'm the single IT person in a company of 8 people, including 3 part timers. We have 11 servers. Our networking and server hosting is done entirely by a partner company. We're an ISP/VoIP telco with about 5000 users, plus who knows how many server hosting customers.

There's probably no general answer. It depends on the environment that has to be maintained (Specialized servers? Fat or thin client? Special software that needs extra attention?), and on how much is outsourced (network infrastructure, sw installation, electrical wiring, helpdesk duties ...).

To give some ideas:

In my company, we have 3 IT people for a staff of about twenty, but that's because our IT people also work for our customers.

For purely inhouse IT, I've seen rations of 10 IT for 300 employees. 1:30 or 1:50 seems about right for general desktop and some light server administration (mail server, file server) plus a bit of help-desk work.

At any rate, 3 IT for 1500 users seems far too little, unless you outsource almost everything (or your users fix most problems themselves :-P).

3 admins to 1500 systems? I have some bad news for you. You are not supporting 1500 systems.

Your users are supporting their systems. You are supporting the servers, network infrastructure, and helping them out a bit with their systems.