Senior IT Manager: Technology Resilience at Old Mutual South Africa

This role is responsible to lead, drive and embed a solid Technology Resilience agenda and capability across OML IT. Contribute towards automation of resilience capabilities, and associated frameworks, tools, and processes with the distinct objective to protect the organization and all services from outages.

Key Result Areas

Financial Management, Risk and Governance

• Responsible for the financial management of Technology Resilience, including budget and expense monitoring.
• Deliver on time and on budget
• Manage and Apply the organization risk and governance frameworks
• Accountability for all risk associated with Technology Resilience operational environment

Technology Leadership

• Delivering on OML’s strategy and ambition to be a digitally led organisation
• Working closely with multiple technology teams, to ensure that our stakeholders have the best of both worlds: end-to-end accountability for their own technology delivery and costs, on the back of stable, flexible, and cost-effective centrally managed platforms

Technology Resilience

• Create a vision and transformation agenda to achieve a Resilience vs. recovery led organization culture within OML IT.
• Lead the consolidated execution of all Resilience plans and strategies.
• Oversee the functional unit and take accountability for the efficient operation of the unit.
• Translate assessment data into business insights and opportunities to improve resilience (which include disaster recovery, service/system monitoring, backup, capacity management, high availability, SPOF etc) frameworks, tools, processes.
• Develop and implement detailed resilience plan and processes to support these assessments.
• Drive the outage prevention mindset across OML IT by creating a focused remediation product teams that address vulnerabilities and known risks.
• Leverage ongoing assessments / reporting to continuously improve Resilience strategies with an outage prevention mindset.
• Collaborate with the rest of OML IT Leadership to drive accountability for remediation of vulnerabilities.
• Work collaboratively across the value chain to align all Technology Teams and Vendors on Resilience plans, processes & practices.
• Stay ahead of the curve on Resilience, Service continuity approaches and best practices.

Management Effectiveness

• Contributes to communication and change management within line structures.
• Develops MOs and specialists under supervision.
• Drives operational excellence through area of supervision.
• Manages service delivery through a team of managers.
• Holds first line managers accountable for managerial work, including selection, performance management and talent management.
• Individually accountable for execution of Resilience strategy.
• Selects potential managers to sustain pipeline.
• Set and Cascade Technology Resilience strategic direction across OML IT teams.
• Effectively communicate business strategy and goals and how they align to the team’s work.
• Proactively attract, recruit, develop, retain, reward, and deploy a diverse resource base aligned to an ever-evolving IT environment (ahead of demand)
• Build a high-performance team environment through self-directed teams by driving performance management and measurement that is aligned with agile working practices (including daily, weekly, etc. sprint routines, regular and honest feedback etc.)
• Accountable for the right people in the right teams to deliver on IT strategy
• Leverage coaching techniques in all related activity to drive a higher quality design and deployment of technical products and services

Vendor & Contract Management

• Manages the relationship between service providers and Old Mutual, including negotiations, contractualisation, service and support (SLAs).

Requirements: Skills, Qualifications and Experience required

• Matric plus relevant degree/diploma
• 7 + years relevant IT work experience
• Must have management experience in IT Operations, Application or infrastructure environment
• Candidate must have an in-depth understanding of IT Resilience best practices, operational risk management, governance, and IT Operations

AND

• Experience leading team within Agile delivery and/or Cloud is preferred
• Experience working within agile teams & transitioning to agile methodologies
• Strong relationship management and interpersonal skills
• Adequate stakeholder management experience up to executive level