The IT Operations Center (ITOC) Manager is responsible for ensuring that all technology services across various functions are actively monitored and effectively managed to meet business needs for availability and performance. This role includes real-time monitoring and the initiation of actions in response to service conditions, events, and incidents across enterprise infrastructure, applications and services. The incumbent is responsible for overseeing staff across all shifts to achieve a continuous 24x7x365 operation. The ITOC Manager will collaborate with IT teams to optimize enterprise Incident Management processes and ensure that the ITOC engineers consistently leverage defined processes to drive incidents to successful resolution. The incumbent also ensures effective communication during an incident both internally within IT and externally to other departments.

Major Incident Management

• Manage a team of ITOC engineers/Major Incident Managers to coordinate incident response, escalation and timely resolution. Ensure that incident communications are sent according to defined standards from both timing and content perspective.
• Lead all High and Critical Major Incident Bridge calls by collaborating with internal and external technology support organizations; take ownership of all major incidents through to resolution and act as a single point of contact IT and business stakeholders.
• Fully responsible for Major Incident Management process, policies, and procedures. Manage down MTTR and MTBF in partnership with engineering and support teams to ensure compliance with OLA’s.

Operations Management

• Coordinate operational support activities with a focus on outage prevention and early escalation. Work across teams/silos to ensure that all operational requirements are met.
• On-board new applications and services into ITOC. Provide training and support across IT teams on ITOC processes, procedures, and best practices. Partner with IT application and infrastructure owners to facilitate improvements from a monitoring and observability perspective.
• Spearhead yearly training exercises/mock bridge calls within ITOC and across silo teams. Ensure that all established bridge call playbooks are up-to-date.
• Discern all user-facing issues, identify trends and coordinate support activities to mitigate adverse conditions that may affect user experience.
• Define key performance indicators (KPIs) for the ITOC and establish metrics to measure performance, analyze trends, and drive continuous improvement initiatives.

Technology Management

• Direct the operations of the ITOC, which includes continuously observing and tracking service health and event monitoring functions, 24/7/365.
• Ensure that the ITOC staff monitors a comprehensive array of information and network systems, including but not limited to: telecommunications circuits, LAN/WAN systems, routers, switches, firewalls, VoIP systems, servers, storage, backup, operating systems, core applications, cloud, and SaaS vendors, etc.
• Manage and maintain major incident paging and communication tools. Ensure that the systems are configured and maintained as per vendor’s best practices.

Talent Development/Leadership

• Lead, manage, and develop ITOC staff and supervisors, oversee staffing needs and conduct annual performance reviews. Create development opportunities that positively impact both the individuals and business.
• Ensure that staff training is delivered on a scheduled cadence and covers knowledge of internal systems, architectures, and support processes as well as use external tools employed by IT.

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform the Duties and Responsibilities (Duties) above satisfactorily and meet the requirements below. The requirements listed below are representative of the minimum knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations will be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the job. If you need such an accommodation, please email staffrecruiting@sidley.com (current employees should contact Human Resources). 

Education and/or Experience: 

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience
• Minimum 5 years NOC/Command Center and/or IT Operations experience, supporting and resolving incidents across enterprise server, storage, network, virtualization and applications
• Minimum 5 years of experience in Major Incident Management capacity
• Minimum 10 years of working in ITIL-based operations organizations
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with solution owners across functions to establish functional playbooks for specific solution triage
• Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot and resolve issues on multiple hardware and software platforms
• Knowledge of ITSM tools such as ServiceNow/Remedy/Jira
• Knowledge of paging tool and incident communications tools such as Crisis Connect/MIR3, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Splunk On-Call
• Knowledge of monitoring and observability tools such as Splunk, ThousandEyes, SolarWinds, LogicMonitor, SumoLogic, AppDynamics

Other Skills and Abilities:

The following will also be required of the successful candidate:

• Strong sense of ownership
• Ability to work under pressure
• Good judgment
• Strong interpersonal communication skills
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills
• Able to work harmoniously and effectively with others
• Able to preserve confidentiality and exercise discretion
• Able to manage multiple projects with competing deadlines and priorities

Sidley Austin LLP is an Equal Opportunity Employer