Executive Director - Infrastructure Services

Executive Director - Infrastructure Services
District Office

The City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) is made up of seven colleges, the largest community college system in Illinois and one of the largest nationally. We provide more than 70,000 students each year access to a quality, affordable education. CCC supports students in meeting their goals – whether that is pursuit of a credential to head into or advance in the workforce, an associate degree with the intention to transfer to a four-year college, free GED or ESL courses, or continuing education. CCC seeks candidates committed to our students' success and offers a unique opportunity for faculty and staff to have a lasting impact in our students' lives.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE
Reporting to the Chief Information Officer, the Executive Director – IT Infrastructure is responsible for the implementation and operation of all technology infrastructure deployed at City Colleges of Chicago (CCC), which includes data center, cloud services, network and telephony, service monitoring, servers, storage and related software. The Executive Director – IT Infrastructure functions in a leadership and management role, exercising strong management, communication, and planning skills and applying extensive and wide range technical knowledge to effectively oversee the administration of CCC's technology infrastructure and systems and direct a staff of network and systems specialists and administrators. Performs related duties as required.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES

• Leads the infrastructure technology and support strategy for the district including physical data center and cloud service management.
• Sets the vision and provides direction for the successful execution of short and long-term goals and engages with IT and business unit leadership, ensuring processes and strategies evolve to meet current support and other functional demands.
• Partners with stakeholders to align and prioritize current and future IT infrastructure initiatives in support of the stakeholders' objectives and business needs.
• Guides teams responsible for evaluating existing IT hardware solutions and identify areas to improve standards, simplify, automate, and enhance functionality to improve long-term supportability.
• Motivates, leads, and develops a team of diverse individuals with a variety of experience levels and skill sets to provide best in class levels of service for the colleges. Executive Director – IT Infrastructure
• Participates in strategic and financial planning for the department as part of the IT management team.
• Provides sponsorship, direction and implementation leadership with opportunities for automation, cost savings, and service quality improvement.
• Creates a strategic roadmap and implementation plan based on business requirements and industry best practices for technology architecture.
• Ensures business critical vendor partners are effectively aligned and executing to established requirements and Service Level Agreements (SLA).
• Assists in the creation, implementation, monitoring and maintenance of Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Operational Level Agreements (OLA) and ensures systems meet or exceed customer expectations as identified within these SLAs and OLAs.
• Ensures that infrastructure teams have developed standardized work processes that are regularly updated through lessons learned from previous projects and consistently applied.
• Oversees the management of hardware project planning and allocation of resources; including providing direction and guidance to the IT Infrastructure management team.
• Prepares budgets and forecasts ensuring effective and efficient use of resources.
• Acts as a steward of corporate standards and cornerstones by establishing and maintaining policies, procedures, and value add processes.
• Collaborates with IT stakeholders to ensure solid disaster recovery architecture and operations including on premise and cloud technologies such as storage area network, high availability server, telephone and data communications, and network architecture.
• Participates in construction planning and supervises technology related areas of new construction and renovation projects.

REPORTING RELATIONSHIPS
Report to: Chief Information Officer
Direct Supervision: Network and Telecommunications Services Managers, Network Support Analysts, IT Systems Administrators, Systems Managers, Infrastructure and Data Communications Managers

Qualifications :

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field from an accredited college or university, or a comparable combination of industry related certifications in IT infrastructure
• Ten years of experience in areas of information systems, IT infrastructure support, and/or systems or network administration
• Five years of experience managing and leading IT technical professionals
• Demonstrated experience managing cloud based services
• Project management experience with proven project management skills
• Customer service skills with the demonstrated ability to explain technical services and solutions to non-IT audiences
• Proficient in the use of MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
• Knowledge and familiarity with cloud service providers
• Technical knowledge of virtualization platforms and hardware platforms such as servers, storage, networking and telecommunications
• Knowledge of network and systems infrastructure design and planning
• Excellent communication, writing and presentations skills
• Strong project management skills
• Strong leadership and team management skills
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Ability to work within a culturally diverse environment
• Ability to create effective project work teams
• Ability to work within a matrix organizational structure

Chicago residency is required for all full-time employees within 6 months of hire.

We are an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.

Thank you for your interest in City Colleges of Chicago.