PURPOSE: 

The Senior Customer Account Executive (Sr. CAE), a critical role within the GO&I organization, partnering with S&P, bridges the business and business IT functions with the infrastructure and operations functions to ensure that the needs and goals of each group are fully understood and achieved where possible. The is fully conversant with the current, and where possible, future needs of the customers, as well as technology and application development trends, ensuring overall satisfaction with the entire range of products and services subscribed to and being delivered by GO&I. The Sr. CAE will proactively represent the customer needs to GO&I, while at the same time representing the objectives of GO&I and its capacity to meet the business needs. The key to this role is striking a balance between business and IT centric advocacy.

 

ESSENTIAL ACCOUNTABILITIES: 

Essential Accountability with Percent of Time

•           Identify and manage customer demand - 25%

o          Provide the primary interface between Business Unit & Segment Leaders and GO&I to identify Customer project and business requirements (Work In-Take Process), communicate the associated technical requirements to GO&I Project Management, and identify the correct GO&I functional resources to support projects.

o          Engage with the customers to fully understand and document current needs and plans in order to communicate and explain these requirements to appropriate functions in GO&I and to include activities in our Demand Planning processes.

o          Participate in the GO&I and business technology budget process and provide periodic reviews to the Business Unit & Segment Leaders. Work to ensure that GO&I prioritization of business requests is in alignment with the business strategy and view of priority.

o          Participate in all phases of the Business Unit & Segment Leaders technology planning process and product road map to provide resource, design, budget, and schedule estimates for global infrastructure support and where appropriate influence or provide guidance around design considerations.

o          Identify Infrastructure Technology Requirements and Opportunities in the business to support business processes and for growth project opportunities

o          Represent GO&I in the customer planning cycles:  Business Customers;  Segment IT Customers;  Operational Processes

o          Identify and Recommend Business Process Improvements       

 

•           Identify project requirements and project delivery - 20%

o          Participate in planning and accountable for oversight of segment requests in the GO&I project portfolio and ensure successful delivery.

o          Work with Business representatives to document and communicate project requirements (documenting Statement of Customer Requirements - SOCR) to the Project Program Manager and Project Manager

o          Work with the Technical Analyst assigned to projects to define options for technical solutions to other GO&I Functions and the GO&I Management team          

 

•           Manage customer communications and expectations - 25%

o          Communicate with the customer in a consultative manner, gathering demand, capturing requirements, while pushing back on demand and technologies that may not be closely aligned with business goals or corporate standards and policies and also ensuring that the prioritization of demand is articulated for clarification.

o          Coordinate responses to the customer needs requiring full understanding of GO&I products, standards, services, SLA's, budget and charging methodology, escalation processes and internal delivery processes.

o          Assist in defining appropriate Business Unit & Segment Leaders service level agreement expectations.

o          Facilitate the identification of appropriate metrics to quantify service levels and recommend improvements.

o          Ensure delivery of primary support services to business unit and segment customers

o          Accountable for customers needs being delivered by GO&I and champion service improvement activities where needed

o          Interface with Segment Relationship Managers where they exist

o          Escalate issues (major outages, severity one) requiring GO&I engagement.  

 

•           Represent Customer Business & Business Process Understanding - 20%

o          Develop and understanding of the Business Processes and the supporting applications and technologies and identify/recommend improvements where possible.

o          Analyze Business Process and Application Development needs and strategies to determine the infrastructure technology impact and articulating options and pros and cons to the customer.

?         Advise the customer the appropriate course of actions and recommended solutions, drawing attention to similar needs in other parts of the business as opportunities to share best practice and standardize.  

 

•           Represent GO&I Standards and Initiatives - 10%

o          Accurately represent the GO&I organization to the internal customer setting appropriate expectations, identifying and resolving any disconnects.

o          Act as the liaison between Business Unit & Segment Leaders and the GO&I organization for communicating GO&I initiatives and standards.

o          Participate in the GO&I Problem Management Process (post-mortem).  Present the post mortem and lessons learned to Business Unit & Segment Leaders   

 

DIMENSIONS: 

•           Combined Revenue of around $6.7 bn. (MHE $2.7bn, S&P $3.1bn, I&M $1bn)

•           Approximately 21,000 internal customers, with 15,000 in North America

•           May have up to 2 direct reports

KNOWLEDGE & EXPERIENCE: 

·         Minimum ten years of experience in Information Technology with significant portion of time managing infrastructure. Considerable background / experience in Business Application Development

·         Minimum six years in senior level leadership role

·         Excellent interpersonal skills

·         Strong demonstrable oral and written influential communication skills; excellent listening skills and the ability to apply the knowledge gained effectively

·         Excellent and proven negotiation skills and meeting facilitation at senior levels

·         Success energizing and influencing teams toward change without direct line responsibility

·         Excellent organizational, leadership and decision-making skills

·         Ability to work in a complex and changing environment

·         Innovative in respect of service quality and ways in which it can be improved within the bounds of the organization

·         Good technical understanding of all aspects of infrastructure including back office, desktop and telecommunications and an ability to translate technical issues into business impacts and vice versa

·         Four year degree in computer science or related field or technical area.

·         Willingness to travel to various locations as needed

·         Experience in managing infrastructure for critical business systems and applications

·         Solid Information Management Business Relationship Management Experience

·         Experience working in an Application Development environment allowing the person to understand the development plans and be able to describe the impact from an Infrastructure perspective.

·         Knowledge of application development methodology and practices, software and tools and conversant with technology trends.

·         Infrastructure operations knowledge, including strong service, and delivery process experience and understanding.

·         Strong customer service orientation; strong interpersonal, organizational and communication skills

·         Communicates effectively verbally and in writing and can present complex technical information to both technical and non-technical audiences.

·         Ability to work and adapt in a dynamic environment and recognize priority issues, escalating accordingly.

·         Strong business and financial acumen with ability to develop a business case and track costs, negotiate vendor contracts and develop a statement of work (SOW).

·         Ability to work both independently or as part of a project group, with time constraints

·         Background in Project Management or good understanding of project lifecycle.

·         Although not directly responsible to staff, excellent leadership capability is critical to gaining respect of customers and the role will involve leading teams and influencing other leaders.

·         Continuous process improvement orientation and experience in an operational context

·         Knowledge delivering services for the following application development platforms:   Database: Oracle;  Development: JAVA/JEE;  Application Server: Weblogic;  Knowledge of Java Frameworks for example Spring MVC, Spring Security, Hibernate etc.;  SOA tools and repositories for example Sonic ESB, Actional Looking Glass, CentraSite;  Workflow tools such as Pega Systems;  Knowledge of Portals such as Vignette

·         Knowledge and experience delivering services with a variety of technologies including:  Windows OS (98, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 etc);  Hardware server/WS platforms including Dell, Compaq & HP; Virtual server environment;  Large scale storage environments an advantage;  Microsoft Back Office applications such as SMS, Exchange and Terminal Server;  Background in troubleshooting skills in WAN/LAN/Desktop situations;  Experience with creating standards and Documentation;  Knowledge of Oracle database environment;  Operating systems: UNIX, Solaris, Linux, AIX

·         Knowledge and experience delivering services in all areas of telecommunications including:  Voice services;  EDMZ services;   WAN / LAN / MAN services

·         Extensive knowledge of all of the following process disciplines:  Change control procedures;  Facility Management;  Hardware Break/Fix;  Auditing and Control procedure; Some knowledge of the following industry disciplines:  ITIL Service Management methodologies;  Six Sigma quality initiatives;  SOX Compliance initiatives and Regulatory compliance;  Understanding of IT Governance Control practices (COBIT);  Understanding of the concept of SOA and Agile Development methodology

 

COMPLEXITY:

 

·     Take part in Agile application iterative development process and work with the GO&I Engineering function to deliver technical solutions to meet evolving needs of the project

·     Understand the Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) where business applications are assembled as modular components, some proprietary some bespoke, and facilitate the infrastructure design required to support such an approach.

·     Understand of digital and web development technologies and the infrastructure implications.

·     Manage conflicting requirements and priorities across business segments and establish agreement on priorities when necessary.

·     Work with and lead technicians and vendors to diagnose problems and manage operational incidents with strong sense of urgency, out of hours or at weekends as necessary to preserve the business performance and service levels.

·     Identify innovative technical solutions to meet business needs cost effectively

·     Identify any process improvement opportunities in the Infrastructure Operations area based on data and champion change.