Repurposing Your Staff: A Major Transfer of Skillsets from Infrastructure to Applications at VCU

Rich Pollack, VP & CIO, VCU Health.  Rich discusses how a detailed review and benchmarking of IT revealed an excessive staffing in infrastructure roles to the detriment of adequate resources for applications support. Working with HR, a plan was developed to transition 40 positions to new roles and provide the training and mentoring needed to train network administrators into application analysts, etc.  A concurrent move to new ways of sourcing infrastructure, such as Network as a Service (NaaS), helped to facilitate this major transition.