Is the approaching public-sector retirement boom a silver tsunami or more of a minor swell? Opinions ran the gamut when we talked to state chief information officers at the annual NASCIO conference in Austin last October.
As for Arizona, Chief Information Officer Morgan Reed reported a small number of IT retirements in 2017. "We're not, I don't think, any more or less exposed to that risk," he said. But he's busy preparing the workforce to better serve the technology needs of the future.
"If somebody has knowledge of how they've been doing something four years ago, and that's still their job," he said, "we've probably failed as management and as leaders in not modernizing those systems and improving those processes or training other people to have that knowledge."
On the modernization front, he's making strides toward retraining IT staff that might have been hired for skills that no longer meet the state's needs.
"The server administrators or the mainframe administrators of yesterday, we are actually pivoting and having them become the cloud administrators of tomorrow."