VP - Head of Applications Services

Job description / Role

Leading bank looking for Head of Applications Services.
Reports To/Line Manager: Head of Technology Services

Head of Technology Services is responsible for leading and managing the organisation that handles activities related to Run the Bank and Build the Bank; infrastructure, operations, application support, application development and design, and change management and PMO. The Head of Application Services ensures that, within the vast scope of delivery for Technology Services, that the application development, support and data management supports Technology Services efforts to provide superior service to its customers.

This role is a strategic technology role and accountable for the quality, health and ongoing improvement of the BANK Groups application landscape. The role is expected to develop a strategic view of the application landscape of the organization to ensure that the applications are fit for use and purpose. The role encompasses the entire gamut of responsibilities; from planning the application landscape in conjunction with the Strategic Technology Officers (STOs) and the Enterprise Architecture (EA) team to delivering the necessary build, enhancement and change activities necessary to align the application landscape with the strategic and tactical demands of the business.

This role will be involved, consulted and also accountable for planning projects (some of which may actually be executed by the PMO) such as new systems implementation, contribute to build/buy decisions, ensure that the existing landscape is on supported n-1 versions, and ongoing support to business users is provided in a way that ensures business user/customer satisfaction. This role is accountable for all aspects of the application landscape: how it is acquired, built, maintained, supported and used. This is a key leadership position and requires strong understanding of the functional breadth of the organization, strong experience in leading large application deployment and support teams and an ability to pull through a number of teams, technologies, channel and application layers to deliver a consistently well performing, highly available, functionally and technically rich application landscape that is integrated in the right way, and provides for the necessary capability for business units to achieve their tactical and strategic goals. Included in this remit is the software delivery capabilities such as development and unit testing standards, documentation, automation capability, the right tooling that supports effective governance, security standards throughout the process, successful and frequent automated releases that do not cause subsequent incidents, etc.

The Head of Application Services will have three areas of focus and responsibility:
1. Application Development
2. Application Support
3. BIDW

Through the Apps Dev Head, this role ensures that the technical, functional and software engineering capabilities are implemented, matured and benchmarked against world class application development departments. This also includes capacity planning, ensuring that we have the right model of in-house vs outsourced capabilities to provide us the right amount of leverage and flexibility.

Through the Application Support Head, this role ensures that end users and where applicable, customers are proactively supported so that they have a positive experience of using the applications to conduct their business activities in a trouble-free, well performing way that is benchmarked to international standards and also emerging expectations such as Web 2.0-type ease of use. This includes, but is not restricted to providing break-fix support, proactive support that is able to anticipate upcoming issues in the functional domain of the applications (such as transactions lying unauthorised close to a currency payment cut-off), providing how-to support, assessing and helping to deliver training of the right kind to promote effective use of the applications, participating and providing support to DR drills, etc., as well as being jointly accountable for application availability and performance SLAs.

Through the BI/DW head, the Head of Application Services will grow and mature the Enterprise wide Data Warehouse and all its technical components and will set the agenda working with stakeholders within the Business Units, the STOs, the BI Governance Team and others to promote the use of data a strategic asset to the organisation. This will include planning and delivering the necessary projects to effectively move the BI/DW platform (including analytic and big data toolsets) to help the bank make predictive decisions that help it achieve its objectives, both short and long term.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES
- Responsible and accountable for planning out the strategy for the application landscape of the bank. Requires close collaboration with Enterprise Architecture and related STOs
- Promote and nurture a stable application environment for the Bank
- Responsible for the quality of the applications delivered
- Accountable to ensure there is adequate capacity for handling Bank requests; provide oversight for Manager of Application Development to ensure the capacity is developed
- Ensure correct process models are used, and that processes are aligned with best practices
- Promote process automation, efficiency and tool utilization to provide superior customer service to the Bank.
- Be an active member of the Delivery Leadership team:
- Help with developing and maintaining the strategy
- Work collaboratively with peers
- Plan and implement Banks data journey with the end goal of developing data as a strategic asset for the Bank.
- Support and implement ongoing data warehouse projects
- Promote and ensure optimum usage of the data warehouse within Business Users
- Responsible for designing yearly budget and plan in accordance with overall bank strategy
- Responsible for identifying and developing key projects for the plans (for the sustenance of existing applications)
- Promote data as a strategic asset for organization use, to pull through the linkages from the application space and the data space so the landscape presents a coherent view to the internal customers
- Accountable to ensure that the portions of service delivery related to applications meets customer expectations, by ensuring that applications deliver against customer requirements and they are on time and at the right level of quality, and applications being used by the customers meet SLA requirements and any requests for support are met on time
- Ensure that Business Partners are providing the expected level of service to the Business Units, and govern their activities
- Effectively integrates across all functions to support the successful execution of the Service Delivery Model.
- Study root cause analysis provided by team members and design permanent fixes for issues
- Mentor, train, and manage Software Support programmers on day-to-day business issues, technical problems, and team protocols

KEY STAKEHOLDERS BUSINESS ACCOUNTABILITY

Internal:
- Enterprise Architecture, STOs, Governance and Compliance, Head of Operations, Head of Service Management
External:
- Business Units, Business Partners
- Ensuring that application changes are delivered on time and on quality
- Ensuring that applications that are in production perform as expected

KEY ISSUES OVER THE NEXT 12 24 MONTHS
- Upgrading existing applications
- Plan capacity for upcoming projects
- Ensure capabilities exist in house for applications coming on stream
- Plan the service management uplift to support the business units

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
- On-time delivery
- Instances of SLA breakage for on-time delivery, availability, risk and security guidelines
- Incidences and problem management

Requirements

- This is a senior Vice President role requiring 15 years working experience
- 6-8 years experience in a banking position role
- 2+ years of experience in leadership role
- Experience leading large development teams
- Knowledge of T24, Murex, TI+, Oracle is necessary, knowledge of EBS is a plus
- Strong exposure to Java and J2E
- Experience with process models, including AGILE
- Experience providing senior level software technical support and root cause analysis for critical production systems

Skills:
- Strong verbal and written communication skills and the ability to effectively interact with non-technical users to negotiate and prioritize the demands of the business areas
- Strong team building, collaboration and resource management skills
- Thorough expertise in enterprise-class application development concepts, methodologies and associated processes

About the Company

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