Group Information Technology Head at Maitland

An opportunity has arisen to appoint a Group Information Technology Head to be based in our Cape Town office.

Summary of the position

The Group Information Technology Head is responsible for a large Information Technology environment. Responsibility includes providing leadership and supervision on data-centre/server, application administration (Monitoring, Supporting, Operations and Reporting), network operations, infrastructure, asset/inventory management, software administration, database administration, availability and capacity management.

Outline of main duties and responsibilities

Responsibility For Risk Management

• Manage the relationship with customer, other internal IT teams and IT service providers or partners that provide IT services for the group;
• Ability and willingness to hold on-call responsibilities to respond to system issues after hours;
• Manage application-specific production support processes, coordinating the involvement of business and/or IT development resources in problem resolution as necessary;
• Assist Operations Maintenance team with problem triage, categorization, root cause analysis and ability to duplicate a problem;
• Ensure appropriate prioritization for scheduled maintenance, including coordination of priorities across IT infrastructure when required;
• Working with business stakeholders to ensure appropriate change management is applied into the production environment according to relevant policies and processes;
• Working with the Problem and Incident manager to provide leadership in critical issue resolution;
• Manage the process of introducing and transitioning new services (or enhancements to existing services);
• Ensure that business requirements to support Operations Maintenance activities are in place to support the design and operation of the production systems;
• Plan and prioritize IT initiatives within the operations group to support ICT Strategy;
• Drive continuous improvement in the areas like: Availability, Capacity, Scalability, Security, Interoperability, Maintainability, Performance, Low Cost of Ownership, Extendibility, Reliability;
• Motivate and take ownership of proposed enhancements, upgrades etc.;
• Ensure appropriate monitoring capabilities to provide advance incident/event notification and performance/availability metrics in compliance with SLAs;
• Collect, analyze and report on SLA and Operations Maintenance metrics data for IT environment;
• Manage and approve all corrective actions within domain;
• Management of a staff in line with HR policies including but not limited to setting of KPI’s, training and career planning, leave scheduling, optimal workload allocation and team structure, reduction of risks due to key man dependencies, ensuring appropriate resources levels and skills, performance management;
• Manage the release calendar for all Operations Maintenance activity;
• Ensure governance, security and audit compliance;
• Manage/verify BCP/DR capabilities and coordinate scheduled BCP/DR exercises;
• Reporting and analysis of ICT Operations including trend analysis of incidents/requests;
• Oversight of all projects directly impacting the relevant environment or making use of direct reports to support the attainment of project goals and objectives;
• Accountable for the timely resolution of all incidents within domain in accordance with the Incident management process, using escalation as necessary.

Skills And Experience Required

Qualifications and Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree or 5 or more years of IT operations management experience;
• 3 or more years of experience leading distributed teams and/or managing workloads for team members;
• Solid knowledge and understanding of ICT Operations and Service Management;
• Prior experience with supporting Windows 2008 server, VMware based server/client virtualization, MS SQL, ORACLE, Unix, Networks, storage;
• Strong oral and written communications skills including presentation development and delivery for clients.

Experience In Designing And Operating Operations Processes

• Experience with the delivery of high availability systems in a 24x7x365 environment;
• Experience with the delivery of large scale batch;
• Experience with event monitoring and issue resolution;
• Extensive understanding of Disaster Recovery and IT Service Continuity, Availability and Continuity management processes and techniques;
• Experience on managing work across a multi-vendor, multi team environment;
• Experience in Risk Management and risk mitigation;
• Demonstrated ability to manage well under pressure and to operate in a decisive and inclusive manner;
• Experience in budgeting and Financial Management;
• Experience in managing/oversight of multiple concurrent projects.

Competencies

• Problem solving;
• Analytical thinking;
• Planning and organising;
• Decision making;
• Leadership;
• Technical knowledge.

Reporting structure

The Group Information Technology Head will report to the Group Chief Information Officer.

Remuneration level

Remuneration will be market related and commensurate with experience and seniority. In addition, the successful candidate will receive a competitive benefits package.