Hiring for VIVO projects
One big aspect of starting a VIVO project is to find the necessary staff to do the work, and the VIVO team receives many questions about the skills and level of effort required. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, since the IT and application support environments vary so widely from large research universities and government agencies to small schools and non-profits.
The recent VIVO survey (written by Paul Albert at Weill Cornell Medical College) includes a question getting at both the amount and division of labor that participating sites have needed. It's telling how many different job tasks can be associated with a VIVO, and also how much variation there is in the range of answers.
| Role | Average FTE | Min | Max | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Project executive or champion | 0.13 | 0 | 0.1 - 0.5 | |
Project manager or coordinator | 0.30 | 0 | 1.1 - 2.0 | |
| Business analyst/information architect | 0.09 | 0 | 0.1 - 0.5 | |
| Ontologist | 0.15 | 0 | 0.6 - 1.0 | e.g., for local ontology extensions |
| Marketing/outreach person | 0.12 | 0 | 0.6 - 1.0 | |
| IT/systems engineer | 0.19 | 0 | 0.6 - 1.0 | e.g., for installation, configuration, and tuning |
| Programmer/ETL specialist | 0.52 | 0 | 2.1 - 3.0 | e.g., for writing scripts to ingest and update data or re-purpose data from VIVO |
| Database administrator | 0.09 | 0 | 0.1 - 0.5 | |
| Web developer | 0.13 | 0 | 0.6 - 1.0 | e.g., for branding and customization |
Content coordinator | 0.16 | 0 | 0.6 - 1.0 | |
Manual entry clerk | 0.07 | 0 | 0.1 - 0.5 |
For the respondents, the total average FTE for the 11 roles described is 1.95 FTE, with a maximum per responding site of 6.5 FTE and a minimum of 0.2 FTE (from an institution in the exploratory stage).
It's also likely that some roles such as project champion, marketer, or even project coordinator may not be officially accounted for but added into the jobs of people already on staff. The programmer/ETL specialist has the highest average commitment of effort, which certainly makes sense. Note the distinction in roles and required FTE between the IT/systems engineer and the programmer/ETL specialist – while the VIVO application is written in Java, the skills required to implement a VIVO focus more on scripting and data ingest, especially after initial installation. And while a Java programmer may be more familiar with writing and deploying applications similar to VIVO, it's familiarity with the application stack (principally Apache, Tomcat, and MySQL) more than Java programming that may be required. Some implementing sites have extended the VIVO software itself for extended functionality (notably the Deep Carbon Observatory project at RPI), but most may never have to change a line of Java.
