Technology Director

The purpose of this position is to establish strategy, vision, roadmap and goals for the technology work streams for the UWFT program. Ultimately, the Finance Transformation project is a software implementation, so technical leadership is critical to this program. This position will drive planning, strategy, and achievement of key technology deliverables throughout the readiness and implementation phases of the program. 

Reporting to the Assistant Vice President within the UWFT Program, the successful candidate will: identify and enact specific technology goals and objectives for the program, ensure appropriate architectural standardization to support reliable analysis and aggregation of data for financial reporting, organize and manage teams to maximum effectiveness and minimum risk, coordinate data conversion, integration, analytics and system adaptation activities across the program, make recommendations to leadership and stakeholders, escalate IT risks and issues impacting program milestones, and ensure appropriate security controls are in place. This position will lead a large and diverse team to successfully design and implement a large and complex technology solution for the University of Washington. 

The Technology Director for the Finance Transformation program must be able to work in a fast-paced, and changing program environment. 

RESPONSIBILITIES: 

Strategic Technical Leadership: 

• Provide technical leadership to technical implementation teams, functional teams, and across the organization. 

• Own the technology strategy for the UWFT program across Application Adaptation, Security, Integrations, Conversions and Analytics/Reporting. 

• Coordinate the design and development of new solutions. Ensure technology design and implementation is comprehensive, strategic, and integrated across the program. 

• As a technical expert, brief and informing leadership, colleagues, partners and customers. Develop recommendations to drive decision-making and buy-in. Report complex technical issues to audiences at all levels of technical understanding. 

• Develop, document, share, and follow technical best practices and standards in architecture, technical solutions design, including templates and exemplar versions. 

• Work to design and deploy a consistent technology methodology across the functional areas. Leverage software development lifecycle knowledge and skills and mentor others in their use across all program phases. 

• Develop a vision to streamline the IT landscape and reduce long term costs. 

Planning & Administration: 

• Define and execute a future state landscape with key leaders that consolidates and aligns to program guiding principles. Understand and navigate a complex distributed systems and integration landscape in order to inform technical design of new system elements 

• Promote technical excellence across team members and assist technical leads in balancing work loads across the functional areas. 

• In collaboration with program leadership, take responsibility for determining high level IT deliverables; as well as ensuring that deliverables and milestones are achieved according to the project plan. 

• Coordinate the UWFT Technology Leadership Team to ensure alignment issue resolution and escalation. 

• Identify, prioritize, and implement service improvements in consultation with the Program Director, and in alignment with overall organizational strategy. 

• Ensure technical leads are managing RAID logs, coordinating the Workday Tenant Management Plan and Company Workbench. Establish technology workstream working with PMO and other worksteam leaders. 

Enterprise Architecture: 

• Act as a strong subject matter expert with a broad working knowledge of technologies within Workday as well as industry standard technologies for data and financial systems. 

• Coordinate the design and development of technical solutions to complex problems. Ensure technology design and implementation is comprehensive, strategic, and integrates across Program. Ensure dependent technologies are considered. 

Team Management: 

• Provide oversight to technical work. Mentor and coach technical leads on supervision, and evaluating tradeoffs, especially as applied to Workday product. 

• Provide feedback to team members as needed to provide opportunities for growth and effective program engagement. 

• Work closely with HR Director to resolve personnel problems or resource constraints when needed. This percentage will increase as the program team grows. 

• Evolve technology team to match the needs of the program as it swiftly transitions from readiness to implementation to production. Participate in planning in regards to team growth and resourcing 

Communication and Consulting: 

• Foster productive and positive communication and collaboration within and between teams. 

• Provide expert and effective support, training, and consulting to customers, customer support teams, partner teams and other internal staff. 

• Communicate clearly with Functional team and Business users regarding requirements gathering, solution development, coordination through various program phases, and external vendor communications. 

• Lead workgroups of diverse technology leaders across the UW demographic. 

• Work closely with technical leadership in other areas of the UW, to include UW-IT, UW Medicine and central Financial Services. 

• Other duties as assigned. 

REQUIREMENTS: 

• Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology, Business Administration, Finance, Accounting, Management, or related degree. 

• Six or more years of technical leadership experience, preferably in supporting complex IT transformations. 

• ERP and/or large administrative system implementation experience. 

• Deep understanding of technical landscape around software conversions, integrations, reporting and large-scale implementation. 

• Effective management under pressure, exercising independent judgment and decision making skills in resolving problems. 

• Bias to process improvement. 

• Awareness of self and impact on others with proven ability to influence. 

• Demonstrated ability to effectively lead, supervise and delegate to staff in a deadline driven environment. 

• Ability to manage and support program planning efforts. 

• Proven leadership, organizational, decision-making, problem solving, analytical, and technical skills. 

• Proven ability to work independently and as well as collaboratively across team leads and program leadership. Ability to collaborate with senior leadership on program enablement matters. Demonstrated excellent written/oral communication skills, presentation skills, technical documentation skills, user liaison skills, and personal interaction abilities. Resilient, agile and able to work in dynamic environment and under pressure. Experience in a lead or supervisory role. 

Equivalent education/experience will substitute for all minimum qualifications except when there are legal requirements, such as a license/certification/registration. 

DESIRED: 

• Experience with the Workday application. 

• Experience working in higher education or large research institution. 

CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT: 

Application Process: 
The application process for UW positions may include completion of a variety of online assessments to obtain additional information that will be used in the evaluation process.  These assessments may include Work Authorization, Cover Letter and/or others.  Any assessments that you need to complete will appear on your screen as soon as you select “Apply to this position”. Once you begin an assessment, it must be completed at that time; if you do not complete the assessment you will be prompted to do so the next time you access your “My Jobs” page. If you select to take it later, it will appear on your "My Jobs" page to take when you are ready. Please note that your application will not be reviewed, and you will not be considered for this position until all required assessments have been completed.