Director, IT Operations

Awarded a Healthiest Employer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona aims to fulfill its mission to inspire health and make it easy. BCBSAZ offers a variety of health insurance products and services to meet the diverse needs of individuals, families, and small and large businesses as well as providing information and tools to help individuals make better health decisions.

This work opportunity requires residency, and work to be performed, within the State of Arizona.

PURPOSE OF THE JOB

· The Director of IT Operations is responsible for leading operations within IT, including department staffing, staff training, personnel oversight, department annual budget administration and forecasting. The leader will oversees the day-to-day functions of IT Operations including systems / application monitoring, alert management, incident management, first level and second response where/when required, balancing data processed by systems, daily backups and restores. The leader ensures the availability, functionality and performance of all critical applications and IT infrastructure.

QUALIFICATIONS

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

1. Required Work Experience

· 15 years of experience in a major services organization, with at least 5 years of supervisory or leadership

experience running large-scale operations .

· 15 years of experience in computer technology and/or information systems

· 10 years of experience troubleshooting computer systems and/or providing service-desk support

2. Minimum Required Education

· High-School Diploma or GED in general field of study

3. Required Licenses

· N/A

4. Required Certifications

· N/A

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

1. Preferred Work Experience

· 15 years of experience with operational support and maintenance

· 10 years of experience ensuring Business System Reliability, Performance, and Availability

· 7 years of experience in IT systems monitoring deployment

· 5 years of health insurance industry expertise

· 3 years of experience in a service strategy role

· Experience and background in health insurance business definitions, needs, reporting requirements, data, and

data structures

2. Preferred Education

· Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, or related field

3. Preferred Licenses · N/A

4. Preferred Certifications

N/A

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

· Provide leadership and management of the Enterprise IT Operations group for successful resolution of system issues across IT infrastructure, security, applications and reporting domains.

· Establish and operationalize operating procedures to ensure efficiency, reliability, availability and performance of critical systems; collaborate with multiple IT/Agile teams to create technical documentation (service process flows and

operational run books), knowledge transfer plan and operational readiness for new technologies.

· Manage enterprise operational activities by optimizing operational activities and driving visibility into IT operations through trending and metrics.

· Define, Develop, Execute and Manage Onboarding process for the "Run" organization

· Coordinate and manage major incident and business recovery functions and processes

· Ensure issues are quickly identified, logged, triaged and resolved to maintain high availability of critical services and business applications.

· Manage end-to-end incident management for content, proper routing, escalation, problem detection, resolution and continuous service improvement.

· Manage communication process to executive leadership, peer groups, and internal customers during outages

· Run technical business recovery and customer communication bridges

· Drive root cause analysis and actions for major incidents

· Create, execute, and report out progress on a vision, strategy, and roadmap for measuring availability and performance of critical business processes and systems.

· Be the authoritative source for critical system availability and performance metrics and reports

· Develop and Automate availability and performance measurement of business processes, applications and infrastructure systems

· Manage IT Operations budget

· Manage IT Command Center, working closely with the Service Desk

· Perform trend analysis on system reliability and drive actions to improve reliability

· Provide inputs to the application, infrastructure, and service teams to help improve availability and performance based on data analysis, and drive / track improvements

· Develop cost-value of each business process and publish cost of system outages or performance issues

· The position requires a full-time work schedule. Full-time is defined as working at least 40 hours per week, plus any additional hours as requested or as needed to meet business requirements.

· Perform all other duties as assigned

· Foster a culture of continuous improvement, promoting collaboration, innovation, and employee engagement within the operations team

· Evaluate and implement new technologies and systems to improve efficiency, scalability, and overall IT operations center performance.

· Develop and implement operational standards, processes, and documentation for enterprise IT/business processes.

· Ensure highest levels of performance across Service Management through the development of accurate and impactful reporting, using data and trends to establish service improvement initiatives.

· Champion Service and Support in projects and demand forums to maintain sufficient capacity across platforms and services agreements.

· Proactively maintain regular engagement with key contacts in line the lines of Business to ensure their expectations are met.

· Responsible for the development of the operational talent pool by optimizing the skills of the existing team, in partnership with our internal recruitment teams to attract the very best external talent, in line with the agreed framework, succession planning will be in place to ensure key roles are filled and individual talent is recognized

· Motivate and effectively performance manage Operations staff to ensure delivery of overall targets and business plan.

· Manage and develop the operational Business relationships by conducting (where appropriate) operational Business review meetings and day to day ops liaison within key workstreams

· Ability to demonstrate achievement of results e.g. business improvements, cost savings, revenue generation

· Excellent leadership, people management, communication and influencing skills at a senior level

· Setting and reviewing of organizational / productivity objectives in line with the Business requirements

· Ability to manage and influence key stakeholders

COMPETENCIES

REQUIRED COMPETENCIES

1. Required Job Skills

· High-level understanding of IT Operations processes

· Strong understanding in Technology Monitoring

· Expertise in Major Incident Management

· Strong knowledge in Business Recovery Management

· Ability to communicate about outages in non-IT business language

· Intermediate proficiency in spreadsheet, database and word processing software, data analytics software

· Strong knowledge of operating systems, (e.g. Windows, AIX, Linux and systems networking and communication

techniques)

2. Required Professional Competencies · Customer service skills to deal with sensitive and difficult customer situations · Ability to evaluate problems and determine hardware / software origin and then determine appropriate solution or escalation · Strong technical ability · Strong analytical skills to support independent and effective decisions · Strong verbal and written communications skills and the ability to interact professionally with a diverse group, executives, managers, and subject matter experts. · Demonstrate critical thinking, intelligent risk taking and problem solving skills · Show attention to detail · Demonstrate process orientation · Demonstrate sense of urgency, decisiveness and a strong bias for action · Demonstrate continuous improvement mindset · Ability to operate independently · Ability to drive results with a matrixed team

· Demonstrate process management expertise necessary to run a system of tracking and resolving issues · Ability to prioritize tasks and work with multiple priorities, sometimes under limited time contstraints. · Ability to work with all levels of management, business and IT functional areas · Independent thinker with strong oral, verbal and interpersonal communication skills · Strong understanding of information systems, business processes and the key drivers and measures for success · Ability to prepare written proposals and deliver presentations.

3. Required Leadership Experience and Competencies

· Provide leadership, promote teamwork, meet objectives and exercise independent judgment

· Experience working collaboratively with other departments and levels of administration

· Demonstated ability to manage adversity and challenging situations

· Ability to optimize resources to ensure a cost effective operation. Includes proactively planning to move staff from one

role to another as staffing needs, business priorities or workload changes.

· Ability to build effective teams.

· Ability to take appropriate risks, using available data.

· Ability to build synergy with a diverse team in an ever-changing environment.

· Provide leadership, promote teamwork, meet objectives and exercise independent judgment

· Experience leading and implementing projects and working collaboratively with other departments levels

· Results orientation, willingness to commit to a direction and drive operations to completion

· Strong organizational and management skills

PREFERRED COMPETENCIES

1. Preferred Job Skills

· In-depth knowledge of business rules and definitions used in the health insurance industry

· Knowledge of internal departments and operations in health insurance industry

· Advanced skill in statistical software and techniques in the analysis and interpretation of complex data sets

2. Preferred Professional Competencies

· Demonstate flexibility, anticipate customer needs and communicate in a manner consistent with business strategy

· Able to cope with multiple priorities and high customer expectations and bridge the demands between internal and

external customers

· Advanced understanding of information systems, business processes and key drivers and measures for success

· Advanced understanding of HIPAA transactions and privacy requirements

· Ability to work with ambiguous and conflicting information while keeping focused on the end goal.

· Advanced skill in driving documentation, run books and standards

· Project management skills

· Conceptualize new business architecture and infrastructure

3. Preferred Leadership Experience and Competencies · Identify resources and training needs while fostering opportunities for staff growth · Presentation and public speaking abilities · Empower associates at all levels and encourage innovation · Foster an enthusiastic and positive work envirnoment · Negotiation and influencing skills with the ability to create win/win situations · Resource management skills

Our Commitment

BCBSAZ does not discriminate in hiring or employment on the basis of race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status or any other protected group.

Thank you for your interest in Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona.  For more information on our company, see azblue.com.  If interested in this position, please apply.