Director Application Support

Principle Duties / Responsibilities

• Develop and execute a comprehensive strategy for building an application production support team in alignment with industry best practices.
• Build, lead and manage the application production support team, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and high performance.
• Develop and implement strategies for efficient application support and incident management.
• Develop and implement enhanced DevOps strategies.
• Establish KPIs and metrics to measure team performance and application stability.

Operational Oversight:

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to oversee daily operations of application support, including incident resolution, problem management, and change management processes to ensure operating level agreements are met.
• Manage and oversee production support operations of vendors involved in supporting applications ensuring vendors adhere to expected service performance levels.
• Manage and oversee Development Operations (DevOps) to ensure timely build and deployment of applications to software environments.
• Ensure timely resolution of production issues and minimize application downtime.
• Proactively plan for and implement routine, minor application/environment patching.
• Ensure root cause analysis is performed for production incidents and that underlying problems are managed to closure.
• Collaborate with development and QA teams to ensure a smooth transition of new applications into non-production and production environments.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Serve as a primary point of contact for business units regarding application performance, issues, and enhancements not addressable by the service desk.
• Work closely with IT leadership to align application support strategies with business objectives.

Process Improvement

• Identify areas for improvement in application support and DevOps processes and implement best practices.
• Drive the adoption of automation tools and techniques to enhance production support efficiency and reduce manual intervention.

Budget & Resource Management

• Plan and manage the budget for application support operations, ensuring optimal use of resources.
• Assess and recommend tools and technologies to enhance application monitoring and support capabilities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, or a related field; Master’s degree preferred.
• 10 years of experience in IT, with at least 5 years in a leadership role focused on application support -- preferably in the commercial insurance industry.
• Strong understanding of application architecture, system integrations, and enterprise software.
• Proven experience in incident management, problem resolution, and process improvement methodologies.
• Well versed in IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) concepts and methods.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to engage stakeholders at all levels.
• Familiarity with job scheduler software, DevOps tools, monitoring tools, IT ticketing systems, and database management.