Job Purpose
The Head of IT Operations is accountable for the reliable, secure, and cost-effective operation of the organisation's IT infrastructure and network, and for delivering IT services to the business. The role provides strategic direction and executive oversight across three pillars — IT infrastructure operations, network operations, and IT service management — ensuring that mission-critical systems are available, resilient and performant, and that end users receive responsive, high-quality service in line with agreed service levels.
Duties and Responsibilities
Strategy and Leadership
- Leads the development of the IT operations strategy and roadmaps for infrastructure, network and service management, and ensures their integration with the overall IT and enterprise strategic plans.
- Works with the IT senior leadership team on the service portfolio and the governance required to prioritise resources across infrastructure, network and service operations.
- Manages the annual OPEX and CAPEX budgets for infrastructure, network and IT service operations to ensure they are consistent with overall strategic objectives, applying disciplined cost management and, where appropriate, showback and chargeback models.
- Directs the development of the sourcing strategy and provides executive oversight for strategic vendor, telco, data centre, cloud and managed-service partner relationships.
- Maintains currency on new and emerging infrastructure, network and service management technologies and platforms, and provides direction on what should be assimilated, integrated and introduced.
- Influences and negotiates across IT and the enterprise to enable cost-effective and innovative shared solutions that achieve business goals.
IT Infrastructure Operations
- Provides strategic direction and oversight for the design, operation and support of IT infrastructure across its full life cycle, including technical architecture, infrastructure engineering and infrastructure operations.
- Manages central teams to deploy and operate the physical data centre, cloud, compute, storage and database infrastructure across the organisation, watching over all aspects of infrastructure health, capacity, availability and performance.
- Ensures robust capacity management, availability, resilience, backup, and disaster recovery/business continuity for all infrastructure services.
- Drives specifications for the tools and automation that facilitate life-cycle management — from installation to decommissioning — of the server and infrastructure fleet at scale.
- Oversees local site and end-user computing technology, ensuring consistent standards, currency and supportability across all operating sites.
Network Operations
- Provides direction and oversight for the operation and support of the enterprise and site network — LAN, WAN, SD-WAN, wireless and connectivity — ensuring secure, resilient and highly available connectivity across all locations.
- Directs network monitoring, performance and capacity management, and the timely resolution of network incidents and problems.
- Drives the automation and tooling required to manage the network fleet at scale and ensures network changes are delivered safely under controlled change management.
- Ensures network operations are aligned with the organisation's security, compliance and governance requirements, partnering with the cybersecurity function on controls and remediation.
IT Service Management
- Provides strategic direction and oversight for IT service support and the end-to-end IT service management life cycle, based on ITIL practices — incident, request, problem, change, configuration and service level management.
- Manages the service desk and end-user support, ensuring a responsive, professional service experience and the achievement of agreed service levels.
- Establishes and governs the service catalogue, service level agreements (SLAs) and operational level agreements (OLAs), and reports transparently on service performance.
- Partners and participates in customer troubleshooting calls and incident root-cause analysis workgroups, and drives effective major-incident and problem management.
- Tracks issues and analyses operational data, looking for trends and systemic issues — metrics, metrics, metrics — and uses insight to drive continual service improvement.
- Implements process improvements and instils best practices in production operations.
Qualifications
- 10+ years in a forward-progressing technology management background, with substantial experience in IT infrastructure, network and service operations.
- Preferably 5+ years of experience in large, cross-functional teams, influencing senior-level management and key stakeholders effectively across the organisation and within complex contexts.
- Will have led an IT organisation managing mission-critical infrastructure, network and service operations.
- Background operating large-scale data centre and network footprints supporting production systems, ideally in a 24x7 or highly available environment.
- Management background that includes experience in managing managers and managing teams.
- Must demonstrate proven ability to lead effectively and meet business objectives in a highly collaborative, high-performance work environment.
- Must be comfortable with ambiguity and fast change, with an ability to adapt quickly and easily.
- Preferably proven experience or demonstrated capability in leading IT transformational and modernisation initiatives in complex and dynamic environments.
- Relevant certifications are advantageous — e.g. ITIL and infrastructure/cloud/network certifications.
Knowledge and Skills
- Exceptional leadership skills, with the ability to develop and communicate an infrastructure, network and service operations vision that inspires and motivates staff and aligns with the IT and business strategy.
- Deep operational expertise across data centre, cloud, compute, storage, database and enterprise network technologies, and how they are best operated at scale.
- Strong command of IT service management practices based on ITIL, and of service desk, incident, problem and change management.
- Success in leveraging automation and modern operating practices to improve reliability, agility and efficiency.
- Excellent analytical, strategic, conceptual thinking, planning and execution skills, with a metrics-driven approach to operations.
- Ability to instil confidence in the business and to demonstrate the business value of IT operations.
- Strong business acumen, including industry and domain-specific knowledge of the enterprise and its business units.
- Expertise in budget planning and financial management, preferably with showback and chargeback models.
- Effective influencing and negotiation skills in an environment where resources may not be under the direct control of this role.
- Strong vendor and partner relationship management skills to identify and leverage resources internal and external to the enterprise.
- Demonstrated ability to develop and execute a strategic people plan that ensures the right people are in the right roles at the right time and that employees are highly engaged and satisfied.
- Ability to drive organisational change and build operational capabilities that balance day-to-day reliability with continuous improvement.
