Director, IT Applications

Confidential Company

JOB PURPOSE

Director IT Applications leads and manages the IT Applications Team, responsible for systems support, development, and a large community of bank users. With a strong understanding of banking and financial services systems, applications, and supporting users, while adhering to ITIL Standards and ensuring customer-focused service. Overseeing application and software implementation, document and maintain bank-wide solutions aligned with organizational standards. Responsible for managing and developing a team of application/software development and support staff, to provide line management, development team leadership, and continuous capability development. Prioritizing and allocating work, to ensure applications and systems meet agreed SLAs and KPIs. Expertise includes application fixes, tuning, performance monitoring, troubleshooting, deployments, support, and documentation of standards and procedures. The role emphasizes outstanding customer service

Strategic Responsibilities

• Formulate and implement departmental strategies and goals aligned with the Application Development unit’s direction. Report performance to the Head of IT.
• Develop and monitor departmental budgets based on planned expenditures. Report to the Head of IT on budget performance.
• Develop and maintain Application Development policies and procedures that comply with leading practices. Ensure consistency throughout EDB.
• Ensure IT systems and applications operate effectively, efficiently, and cohesively to achieve high operating standards.
• Adopt leading IT practices from the banking sector and other sectors.
• Monitor application quality and ensure adherence to quality standards and internal customer satisfaction.
• Enforce robust change management practices for applications and software solutions.
• Ensure the Applications team delivers a professional, customer-focused, and high-performing support service.
• Support team member professional development and performance management.
• Provide coaching and mentoring to ensure all objectives and commitments are met.
• Maintain and improve application and software support methods, standards, KPIs, and SLAs across all EDB IT-supported applications and software.
• Ensure quality management processes are followed, including robust, fully tested, high-quality support methods, procedures, and tools.
• Develop and maintain professional relationships with key stakeholders, including IT, business, relevant third parties and strategic suppliers.
• Provide clear ownership and resolution of incidents/problems against supported applications/systems to agreed SLAs and KPIs
• Ensure root causes for major/critical incidents are complete, and resolved or provide workarounds to mitigate future incidents.
• Assist with business continuity and service recovery plans and activities. Ensure applications/software environments are fully maintained with supported updates, patches, and service packs.
• Manage IT application/system access requests, ensuring compliance with agreed SLAs, security policies, and procedures.
• Maintain high professional conduct, ethics, and integrity in departmental services.
• Develop and retain talented employees to achieve shareholder/financial objectives.
• Help the Bank fulfill social responsibilities by developing and retaining Emirati employees, aiming to improve the Emirati employee ratio.
• Identify and develop ‘lead practice’ learning initiatives.
• Continuously review and update learning and development programs.

Operational Responsibilities

• End-to-end management of software solutions and applications used by EDB Business and the back office.
• Partner with business heads and stakeholders to achieve business objectives from software and applications. Act as a main advisor during the business case phase.
• Manage application teams throughout the acquisition, development, and deployment cycles: business case, acquisition, analysis, design, development, quality assurance, deployment, and post-live support.
• Align application development, acquisition, and enhancements with stakeholders based on business objectives and team capacity.
• Adopt various software acquisition/development approaches, such as Agile and SCRUM.
• Enforce digitization and automation across EDB applications.
• Review contracts related to applications, including licensing and vendor support agreements.
• Ensure vendor compliance with contracts to ensure products adhere to governing rules and regulations.
• Oversee the gathering of requirements, functional, and technical designs, development, testing, and implementation of in-house applications based on the Bank’s preferred platforms and leading practices.
• Monitor and recommend solutions to end users and provide adequate systems to address requirements.
• Manage technical design documents for conversions, interfaces, and reports.
• Modify application standard reports and create new reports, reviewing against the Application Data Model.
• Improve the Bank’s applications and business processes, including additional reports, interfaces, manuals, and training materials.

• Lead technical teams, including business partners and subcontractors, during project execution.
• Ensure secure and stable operation of the Bank’s application systems.
• Manage version control, configuration, and defect management for supported applications
• Participate in professional development to maintain skills and knowledge.