Associate Director, ITSM Process Owner

Job Summary

Otsuka seeks an IT service management leader who makes disciplined ways of working an enabler of reliable technology, better experiences, and business value. This role will strengthen IT-wide accountability while helping teams work effectively across organizational and supplier boundaries. The Associate Director owns the purpose, design, controls, measures, adoption, and improvement of assigned ITSM practices.

The role provides functional direction and operational oversight for vendor resources supporting assigned ITSM processes, including setting priorities, coordinating work assignments, reviewing deliverables, monitoring capacity and service commitments. Platform and service owners remain accountable for their services; process managers and delivery teams execute the practices. The ServiceNow platform owner retains accountability for the platform roadmap, architecture, technical delivery, and platform operations. This role defines process requirements and acceptance criteria and jointly prioritizes enabling capabilities.

Core Responsibilities

IT-Wide Practice Ownership and Service Discipline

• Lead the execution, adoption, and continuous improvement of Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Enablement, Service Request Management, Knowledge Management, and Service Configuration Management practices across IT.
• Establish clear interfaces with release, deployment, asset, monitoring and event, and supplier management practices.
• Apply ITIL V4 and ITIL V5 concepts, as well as Agile approaches, to create value through integrated practices and value streams, not isolated process compliance.
• Address people and organization, information and technology, partners and suppliers, and workflows together.
• Serve as an ambassador for the ITSM practice to the IT Service Owners.
• Promote best practices, communicate their value and engagement pathways, and gather stakeholder feedback to improve adoption, accessibility, service quality, and user experience in partnership with accountable service owners.
• Recommend enhancements to practice standards, procedures, controls, roles, and performance measures in partnership with IT leadership and service owners.
• Establish named execution owners across internal teams and suppliers; maintain applicable SOPs and Work Processes and review them periodically with IT and Global Quality.
• Strengthen incident prioritization, escalation, major incident communications, and learning reviews.
• Ensure Problem Management addresses recurring and material failures through evidence-based investigation, known errors, workarounds, and verified corrective action.
• Advance risk-tiered Change Enablement, with proportionate assessment, authorization, scheduling, emergency handling, and review.
• Support appropriate standard changes and delivery automation without weakening accountability or bypassing controls.
• Set practical standards for request fulfillment, reusable knowledge, service configuration information, and service-level measurement.
• Work with accountable data and service owners to improve information quality, dependency visibility, and end-to-end support.
• Monitor adherence to ITSM practices, identify risks and improvement opportunities, and provide recommendations to leadership on corrective actions.
• Integrate applicable security, privacy, quality, validation, records, and audit requirements with Information Security, Quality, Compliance, and delivery stakeholders.
• Simplify controls where possible without compromising required evidence or risk treatment.

Service Introduction, Performance and Continual Improvement

• Lead and coordinate service introduction and operational readiness activities to support successful deployment of new and enhanced services.
• Partner with delivery leaders and platform and service owners to build operational requirements into design and delivery, rather than adding them immediately before go-live.
• Define proportionate readiness and acceptance criteria for ownership, support and escalation, service levels, monitoring, configuration and asset information, knowledge, capacity, resilience, recovery, security, training, and lifecycle support.
• Coordinate evidence and handoffs with accountable delivery and service owners.
• Make readiness gaps, residual risks, remediation commitments, and acceptance decisions explicit.
• Establish outcome-oriented measures and service reviews that expose recurring incidents, change-related disruption, restoration performance, request quality, knowledge usefulness, readiness gaps, and user experience.
• Challenge favorable dashboards when underlying evidence or service outcomes do not support them.

Influence, ServiceNow Partnership and AI-Enabled Transformation

• Lead an evidence-based improvement roadmap using baselines, value-stream analysis, stakeholder feedback, and practice capability assessments.
• Prioritize improvements by business value, risk, effort, and capacity; verify sustained benefits rather than closing actions on activity alone.
• Build commitment across IT leaders, platform and service owners, delivery teams, and suppliers through consultation, facilitation, negotiation, coaching, and clear escalation.
• Establish communities of practice and targeted enablement that make disciplined execution easier to adopt.
• Partner with the ServiceNow platform owner to translate practice needs into prioritized requirements, user stories, data standards, reporting, and acceptance criteria.
• Validate process outcomes and adoption while respecting platform architecture, configuration, release, and investment governance.
• Identify, evaluate, and support implementation of AI-enabled and automated solutions that enhance ITSM effectiveness and user experience.
• Identify and evaluate opportunities such as assisted triage, knowledge creation and retrieval, trend analysis, and decision support; simplify the underlying work before automating it.
• Define human review, escalation, override, traceability, and quality checks for AI-enabled workflows with the platform owner and relevant control functions.
• Validate outputs and measure benefits and failure modes; retain accountable human judgment for material service, change, risk, and exception decisions.

Qualifications

Knowledge / Experience and Skills

• 8+ years of progressive IT experience with demonstrated experience leading ITSM process improvement, service governance, or operational excellence initiatives.
• Demonstrated success establishing or materially improving ITSM discipline beyond a single team, with evidence of sustained adoption, stronger controls, reduced service disruption, or improved customer outcomes.
• Deep applied knowledge of ITIL 4 practices and working knowledge of ITIL (Version 5), including value creation, integrated digital product and service management, continual improvement, and responsible AI-enabled transformation.
• Substantial practical experience in Incident and Major Incident Management, Problem Management, and Change Enablement, with working breadth across requests, knowledge, configuration, service levels, and continual improvement.
• Experience governing service introduction and operational readiness across project, product, platform, and service teams; able to establish durable ownership and proportionate acceptance criteria.
• Experience leading in outsourced or multi-supplier environments, resolving cross-boundary ownership gaps, and translating service-level and process evidence into corrective action with accountable owners.
• Strong analytical capability: interprets operational data, tests data quality, distinguishes symptoms from systemic causes, and defines measures that connect practice performance to service and business outcomes.
• Demonstrated organizational change capability, including stakeholder analysis, facilitation, negotiation, coaching, communication, and reinforcement of new ways of working.
• Functional fluency in ServiceNow ITSM workflows, reporting & dashboarding, knowledge, and configuration information; able to define requirements and acceptance criteria with the platform owner.
• Executive communication and matrix leadership: earns credibility with technical and business stakeholders, makes trade-offs clear, secures commitments without direct authority, and escalates constructively when alignment cannot be achieved.
• Experience evaluating AI-enabled or automated service workflows, including business value, data quality, human oversight, operational risk, and measurable adoption; hands-on transformation delivery is preferred.
• Sound human judgment: weighs evidence, business impact, uncertainty, and risk; recognizes when standard workflows or AI recommendations are insufficient and brings decisions to the appropriate accountable owner.
• Experience in a regulated life sciences or similarly controlled environment is preferred, including familiarity with audit evidence, quality requirements, and applicable computerized-system controls.
• Customer-focused: connects ITSM discipline to reliable services, usable experiences, and business value rather than administrative compliance alone.
• Accountable and persistent: establishes clear commitments, follows through, and verifies that improvements resolve the underlying issue.
• Curious and pragmatic: questions assumptions, learns from evidence, and adapts frameworks to context without unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Collaborative and influential: listens to understand, builds shared ownership, handles disagreement respectfully, and coaches others toward durable change.
• Ethical and candid: reports inconvenient facts accurately, challenges unsupported conclusions, and preserves transparency and accountable human decisions.
• Composed and resilient: exercises proportionate judgment under pressure and balances urgency with control, learning, and service continuity.
• Able to develop process managers and practitioners through practical guidance, coaching, and targeted training.
• Systems thinker: understands dependencies across people, practices, information, technology, and suppliers; improves end-to-end flow rather than optimizing one team at another team's expense.
• Experience collaborating with globally distributed teams and communicating effectively across organizational and cultural boundaries.
• Travel approximately 5-10%, based on business needs.

Educational Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related discipline, or an equivalent combination of relevant education and professional experience. Advanced education in technology management, organizational change, operations, or business is advantageous but not required.