Director, Strategic Initiatives

IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 6000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters–at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge.

At IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.

We celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.

By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.

We’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference.

If you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.

This is a key leadership position, driving operational excellence, strategic alignment, and overall efficiency within the IFS Unified

Support function. This role requires a dynamic individual with strong leadership skills, exceptional communication abilities, and a strategic mindset to enhance the organization's effectiveness. The Director of Strategic Initiatives will operate through hands-on self-

Driven deliverables, co-ordination and editorial of other contributor’s work, and the direct management of a small team.

8 re components:

1. Strategic Planning

Ensure effective execution of the Unified Support strategy, in alignment with the wider Global Customer Services and overall IFS strategic direction. Partner with the divisional SVP, the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and surrounding IFS functions (Finance, HR, R&D, Commercial, IT) to deliver on the strategy through partnerships, prioritisation, advocacy, and measurement.

Help manage the SLT and the SVP’s duties - preparing agendas, facilitating sessions, crafting materials and messaging, managing follow-through and ownership.

2. Operational Oversight

Continually monitor and respond to operational developments, as they pertain to strategic execution. Utilise new and existing communication channels, measurement dashboards and broad organisational relationships to identify and address opportunities for efficiency and effectiveness.

3. Cross-Functional Collaboration

Work closely with stakeholders across IFS (Finance, HR, R&D, Commercial, IT) to ensure continual alignment of strategies and prioritisations, especially with regard to financial drivers, growing service and product offerings, improving end customer experience and developing employee opportunities and ways of working.

Act as a primary contact point for Unified Support, uniting collaborators and initiatives to streamline progress and mitigate duplication or conflict in prioritisation. Nurture cross-functional teamwork across the team.

4. Performance Metrics & Analysis

Continually develop and monitor measurement capabilities and results, with specific analytical and action planning activity for Key Performance Indicators and measures connected directly with strategic execution and employee compensation.

5. Project Management / Project Steering

Represent Unified Support interests in various project/programs of work, including development of new services, enhancing commercial frameworks, pre- or post-Merger & Acquisition integrations, enacting change in tooling, processes, performance, or any other program of change to how employees engage and work. Ensure timely completion or projects and programs governed directly by yourself and your SLT peers. Ensure audience-tailored status reporting is developed and delivered for all key projects and programs.

6. Team Leadership

Provide effective direct management of a small team. Additional, provide leadership and mentorship advisory for the Senior and Extended

Leadership team to foster positive, strategically-focused and high-performance culture.

Conduct regular organisational performance reviews and implement development plans where necessary to ensure we are staffed, structured, skilled, and operating in a way that supports our ability to succeed.

7. Communication

Continue the development of a central Communications function to ensure we communicate with clarity, consistency, and speed (when needed), and that we do this in a manner that it is easily received, understood and acted upon.

Ensure we are addressing the full spectrum of Internal Audiences, with prioritisation driven by strategic decision making (i.e. Executive to Executive materials and messaging), or strategic execution (i.e. Change adoption, in a team of 1000 members).

Complement the communication strategies of GCS and IFS overall to ensure we keep employee expectations and experiences around finding information as simple and consumable as possible.

8. Procurement

Oversee the procurement workflow within Unified Support , and its effective alignment to both IFS Procurement central processes, and Unified Support business needs. Continually improve ease of interaction for business stakeholders, efficiency of end-to-end processes, and predictability and transparency of costs.

Skills/ Competencies

• Proven history in strategic planning, business development, or corporate strategy
• Demonstrated success in evaluating business performance; identifying measures, data analysis and interpreting impact
• Ability to identify and implement business improvement and/or cost saving initiatives
• Knowledge in developing and steering new service opportunities in line with business strategies and targets
• Sustaining Leadership Transparency and Accountability
• Advanced communication skills, written, verbal and preferably illustrative too:
  • Compelling Storytelling
  • Executive Messaging and Briefings
  • External and Internal Communications
  • Communication Coaching
  • Simplifying complex concepts
  • Inspiring action
  • Coherency across strategic, tactical and operational mandates
• Emotional Intelligence

Qualifications

• A university qualification in a relevant field (business administration, computer science, engineering, etc.). An MBA or advanced Degree can be beneficial.
• Proven history as a business or strategy leader

We believe that coming together as a community, in person, is important for innovation, connection and fostering a sense of belonging. Our roles have the right balance of remote and in-office working to enable flexibility for managing your life along with ensuring a real connection with your colleagues and the broader IFS community.