SVP, Infrastructure and Cloud

Company Details

Berkley Technology Services (BTS) is the dynamic technology solution for W. R. Berkley Corporation, a Fortune 500 Commercial Lines Insurance Company. With key locations in Urbandale, IA and Wilmington, DE, BTS provides innovative and customer-focused IT solutions to the majority of WRBC’s 60 operating units across the globe. BTS’s wide reach ensures that ideas and opinions are considered at every level of the organization to guarantee we find the best solutions possible.  

Driven by a commitment to collaboration, BTS acts as consultants to our customers and Operating Units by providing comprehensive solutions that not only address the challenge at hand, but proactively plan for the “What’s Next” in our industry and beyond.  

With a culture centered on innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, BTS stands as a community of technology leaders with eyes toward the future -- leaders who truly care about growing not only their team members, but themselves, and take pride in their employees who shine. BTS offers endless ways to get involved and have the chance to grow your career into a wide range of roles you'd never known existed. Come join us as we push forward into the future of industry leading technological solutions.  

Berkley Technology Services: Right Team, Right Technology, Simple and Secure.  

The company is an equal opportunity employer.

Responsibilities

This is the most senior role in the Infrastructure and Cloud function with global accountability.  The SVP of Infrastructure and Cloud is responsible for the delivery of all IT infrastructure and related technical operations along with enterprise architecture.

This position has equal focus on operational execution and transformational initiatives and requires a high degree of collaboration with other technical and business leaders to ensure our solutions are business aligned.  This role ensures that day-to-day delivery of Infrastructure services meets or exceeds business expectations and works to ensure continual improvement on SLAs and communication.  He / she responds to industry trends by helping business leaders facilitate the decision-making process and providing actionable recommendations on initiatives and policies to help the organization innovate and drive toward targeted business outcomes.  This role is also the senior stakeholder and owns all relationships with externally sourced infrastructure and related technical operations capabilities.

Strategic and Operational Planning and Execution

• Collaboratively sets the mission, vision, and strategy of the Infrastructure organization to maximize the success of business and IT enterprise initiatives.
• Responsible for all operational infrastructure and works collaboratively to ensure a stable and secure environment.
• Develops and controls the annual Infrastructure budget to ensure that it's consistent with the overall strategic objectives of IT and the enterprise and is within plan. Creates a culture of continuous cost optimization.
• Develops and executes a strategy to improve business value that the Infrastructure function provides, and continuously seeks to ensure alignment to customer needs. 
• Provides strategic direction and oversight for the full life cycle of IT systems, working in close partnership with peers, and identifies where common approaches, solutions, and shared platforms provided by Infrastructure could drive efficiency. 
• Helps the enterprise find the right balance between enterprise risk and agility. Steps up and communicates key technology recommendations to business and IT leaders to get buy-in.

Build and Maintain Relationships

• Builds successful stakeholder relationships with other IT and business key leaders by developing a clear understanding of business needs, acting as a trusted advisor, and ensuring cost-effective delivery of IT services to meet those needs.
• Collaborates with the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) to ensure infrastructure contributes to, embraces, and applies security strategy.
• Collaborates with peer IT Leaders to ensure knowledge and insight can be freely shared.
• Negotiates and influences partners and providers to ensure the best outcomes for infrastructure and the broader business.
• Traverses organizational boundaries both horizontally and vertically to build the most effective stakeholder alliances.

Drives Innovation

• Partners with IT and business leaders to identify and prioritize opportunities for significant technology/process improvements.
• Introduces innovative, differentiating infrastructure and related operations capabilities that enhance our overall competitive capabilities and enhance employee productivity.
• Keeps track of trends and provides direction on what emerging technologies should be incorporated into Infrastructure products and services to successfully deliver overall IT strategy.
• Seeks out new technologies and partners offering competitive advantage.  Pushes Infrastructure to lead in innovation, not just follow and support.
• Develops and applies standards and minimal viable architectures informed by the business strategy.
• Develops the maturity of Infrastructure to improve efficiency, deliver new innovations and increase collaboration with other IT and business areas (e.g., through Agile, DevOps, platform, and product approaches).
• Champions Infrastructure involvement in the organization's innovation efforts and encourages experimentation with new solutions to avail business opportunities.

Executes Against Business Priorities

• Works with the IT senior leadership team on the service portfolio and governance required to prioritize resources, including budget. Works with key stakeholders to measure and prioritize technical debt remediation.
• Develops business cases that appropriately weigh costs and benefits and collaborates on decisions.
• Improves IT resilience by executing strategies that improve reliability and disaster recovery readiness.
• Continuously evaluates the business value of Infrastructure, including the use of metrics such as Key Performance Indicators, Outcome Driven Metrics and Objectives and Key Results.
• Defines, develops, and manages a comprehensive and integrated IT Service Management (ITSM) landscape, based on best-practice processes, disciplines, and related toolsets. This includes delivery of a comprehensive IT asset management program.
• Drives the adoption of (and commitment towards) service improvements through a programmatic approach to continuous improvement which also measures impact and shares results.

Team Leadership

• Designs, develops and empowers a strong and diverse Infrastructure team.
• Directs the development of an Infrastructure sourcing strategy and provides executive oversight for strategic vendor and partner relationship management.
• Works with HR and the IT leadership team to develop and execute workforce plans that ensure Infrastructure can supply skilled resources to meet demand.
• Builds a compelling employee value proposition for Infrastructure, attracting and retaining great talent.
• Contributes to a culture of inclusion, learning, and transparency.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in business, computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, system analysis or a related field of study, or equivalent experience.
• MBA or Masters in Computer Science preferred.
• Five or more years of driving infrastructure strategy and execution for a large, global enterprise ($5B ) in a leadership capacity (must).
• Ten or more years of experience in at least three of the following disciplines:  network, database management, server management, end user services, or data center operations in a multitier environment at scale.
• Led at least one end to end cloud migration of data centers (applications and data) at a large company (must)
• Three or more years leading large technical organizations (100 ) comprising multiple teams, geographical areas, and technical disciplines (must).
• Exceptional leadership skills, with the ability to develop and communicate an Infrastructure vision that inspires and motivates staff and aligns with the IT and business strategy.
• Effective influencing and negotiation skills in complex environments where resources required for success may not be in direct control of this role.
• Evangelizing and implementing transformational initiatives where the target state included Agile, DevOps, SRE, and cloud adoption at scale.
• Consolidating infrastructure and related operations capabilities to deliver improved efficiency, while balancing customer preferences for agility and performance.
• Excellent analytical, strategic conceptual thinking, strategic planning, and execution skills.
• Ability to build consensus, make decisions based on many variables, and gain support for major initiatives.
• Developing staff including coaching, mentoring and performance management.
• Maximizing effectiveness of global resource models.
• Building cloud management solutions, including software development, integration, and ongoing engineering aspects. 
• Creating self-service mechanisms to streamline infrastructure provisioning and ongoing management.
• Budget planning and financial management, preferably with chargeback models.
• Supporting the shift from CapEx to OpEx with processes - e.g., those to comprehensively manage and optimize cloud costs in a collaborative fashion.
• Deep understanding of current and emerging Infrastructure technologies and practices, and how other enterprises are developing and deploying them.
• Applying Infrastructure capabilities to achieve regulatory or statutory compliance requirements.
• Establishing and improving DevOps, as well as other working practices (e.g., ITIL, Agile).
• Demonstrated ability to develop and execute a strategic staffing plan that ensures the right people are in the right roles at the right time, and employees are highly engaged and satisfied.
• Leading cloud adoption (at scale), including migration projects and modifying Infrastructure’s target operating model.
• Third-party management, working closely with sourcing and vendor managers.
• Ready to think, behave and act in an innovative manner to drive the organization’s digital business strategies.
• Understand and speak the language of the business.
• Trusted and respected as a thought leader who can influence and persuade business and IT leaders.
• Highly collaborative and supportive of business and of its ideals and strategies.
• Highly innovative with aptitude for foresight, systems thinking and design thinking.

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