Director of IT

Madison Mutual Insurance Company is seeking an experienced Director of IT to oversee all IT (Information Technology) functions of the company.  This role is responsible for overseeing and managing the entire IT department and ensuring that the company’s technology systems are reliable, secure, up-to-date, and meet the needs of the company.  This position works closely with the management team and senior leadership and is integral to the overall success of the company.  The candidate must be a clear communicator with the ability to successfully lead a team and collaborate with all levels of staff. 

Essential duties and responsibilities:

• Lead and prioritize IT initiatives and coordinate the evaluation, deployment, and management of current and future systems as well as associated operational functions
• Accountable for all production systems and environments, including responsibility for the overall effectiveness and efficiency of data center operations (in house and cloud) and networks to ensure high levels of customer satisfactions and reliability (internal and external)
• Lead IT operations to ensure deadlines, risks, constraints, resources, tasks, priorities,  and interfaces are understood and communicated
• Responsible for IT vendor relationship management
• Support negotiation of vendor agreements from all elements related to service and IT needs, including hardware, bandwidth, and third-party software vendors
• Ensure IT team is sufficiently skilled and experienced to perform tasks through continual assessment of performance and acting to coach, correct or improve where required
• Ensure information security standards are met across all IT applications
• Assess and manage IT risk, conduct regular vulnerability and independent risk assessments
• Maintain solid understanding of and experience with security control frameworks
• Ensure business continuity and disaster recovery plans meet acceptable business risk levels
• Develop and review budget for IT department and ensure it complies with corporate goals, guidelines, and objectives
• Supervises and manages all department personnel issues including hiring, coaching, terminations, career development and disciplinary situations

Education and/or work experience requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field
• 5-7 years’ experience managing people required
• Minimum 10 years overall network service experience, with a minimum of 5 years in a leadership position
• Experience implementing and tracking service level and metrics reporting
• Experience developing and streamlining processes

Qualification/Skill requirements:

• Effectively communicates with all levels of management and handles adversarial and sensitive situations with tact and diplomacy
• Proven ability to effectively prioritize and execute tasks in a high-pressure environment
• Inspiring, results driven, motivating and strategic leader
• Project/program management and the ability to work on projects that range in size, complexity, and duration
• Strong written, oral, and presentation oriented communication skills 
• Highly self-motivated and directed with an attention to detail
• Strong knowledge of and experience in managing a virtualized cloud-based infrastructure
• Experience working in the insurance industry with components such as underwriting, claims and billing solutions. 
• Experience with Guidewire InsuranceNow core systems a plus

Physical requirements:

• This job operates in a professional office environment.  The role routinely uses standard office equipment such as laptop computers, photocopiers, mobile phones, etc.
• While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to stand, walk, sit, push, pull, stoop, kneel, reach, use hands to finger/handle/feel, and lift or carry up to 50 pounds

Ability to perform the essential job functions consistent safely and successfully with the ADA, FMLA and other federal, state, and local standards, including meeting qualitative and/or quantitative productivity standards