Director, IT Operations, XLA & Digital Workplace

Overview

At Banner Life Insurance Company, we lead with heart and ambition. Every day, we transform purpose into progress, guided by our unwavering commitment to be better for our customers, clients, and communities, not just today but long-term as well. Our people are the driving force behind everything we achieve. Their passion, purpose, and pursuit of innovation empower us to deliver cutting-edge solutions that support those we serve, ensuring we are here for you, here for good and striving for better.

We’re a forward-thinking company energized by our work and how we show up for one another. Our culture is built on meaningful impact and genuine enjoyment, because we believe great work and great experiences should go hand in hand.

By offering career development opportunities, comprehensive benefits, and programs that support your wellbeing, we help you thrive personally and professionally. We are here for you, here for good and here for better.

Banner Life has experienced significant growth over the past several years, driven by digital transformation and platform-led innovation. As we look ahead, we have an ambitious goal to more than triple our revenue over the next decade by expanding into new products, distribution channels, and customer experiences.

Technology & Transformation plays a central role in enabling this growth. As the business scales, our technology operating model must also evolve — from traditional SLA-based service delivery to an experience-led, resilient, and partner-enabled XLA model that supports productivity, operational confidence, and enterprise agility.

Within this context, IT Operations, XLA, and Digital Workplace are critical capabilities. This role owns the RUN operating model and ensures managed service partners, internal teams, and enterprise platforms operate as one integrated service ecosystem focused on user experience, reliability, resilience, service quality, and continuous improvement.

The Director, IT Operations, XLA & Digital Workplace is accountable for the enterprise RUN / XLA operating model across employee-facing IT services, managed service partner performance, Digital Workplace, Service Desk experience, operational resilience, and continuous service improvement.

This role owns the shift from traditional SLA-based service delivery to an experience-led operating model, ensuring technology services are measured and governed by productivity, usability, reliability, recoverability, and business impact.

The Director acts as Banner Life’s primary operational counterpart to XLA managed service partners, ensuring day-to-day RUN execution remains aligned to enterprise standards, service expectations, user experience outcomes, and continuous improvement objectives.

This role protects the RUN / CHANGE boundary by ensuring RUN owns operational performance while systemic issues and platform improvements are fed into the appropriate Change / Transform roadmaps.

This role has significant commercial and operational accountability, including governance of an XLA managed service model of approximately $10M per annum and oversight of a managed service partner team of approximately 90+ people.

Responsibilities

IT User Experience (XLA) Strategy & Ownership

• Own and evolve the enterprise IT User Experience (ITUX) and XLA strategy.
• Define experience outcomes across End User Computing, Digital Workplace platforms, Service Desk, Network, Collaboration, and Core IT services.
• Translate employee and business expectations into measurable experience indicators and prioritized improvement roadmaps.
• Partner with Infrastructure Change / Transform teams to ensure new or changed services are operationally ready before transition into RUN / XLA ownership.
• Drive clear accountability between RUN and CHANGE teams, ensuring operational issues are owned by RUN while systemic improvements are fed back into transformation roadmaps.

Managed Service Partner / XLA Governance

• Serve as Banner Life’s primary operational owner for the XLA managed service partner model, including service performance, governance cadence, escalation, service improvement, and operational accountability.
• Govern managed service partner performance against XLA, SLA, KPI, service resilience, user experience, and continuous improvement expectations.
• Partner with Vendor Management, Procurement, and Finance to ensure managed service partner performance, service credits, contractual commitments, and improvement obligations are visible and actively governed.
• Ensure vendor-delivered services align to Banner Life’s experience, reliability, resilience, and continuous improvement expectations.
• Ensure managed service partners operate with an ownership mindset, proactive problem management, effective communication, and measurable reduction in repeat incidents and operational noise.

Digital Workplace & Support Experience

• Own the end-to-end Digital Workplace experience across endpoint services, collaboration platforms, productivity tooling, remote access, and hybrid work enablement, in partnership with domain engineering teams responsible for platform architecture and change..
• Define and evolve the end-to-end support experience model, including Service Desk interactions, self-service, automation, escalation, and communication during incidents and outages.
• Ensure digital workplace and support services are secure, performant, intuitive, scalable, and aligned to user productivity and business needs.
• Improve first contact resolution, time to restore experience, adoption, and employee satisfaction with workplace technologies.

Experience Measurement, Telemetry & Insights

• Establish and operationalize experience telemetry (sentiment, performance, reliability, adoption, friction) across IT services.
• Own executive‑level experience dashboards and reporting, highlighting trends, risks, and proactive interventions.
• Shift IT measurement from ticket‑centric views to journey‑based experience insights (joiner, mover, leaver, day‑in‑the‑life).

Continuous Service Improvement

• Own and govern the continuous service improvement agenda across IT Operations and managed service partners, ensuring improvement plans are measurable, prioritized, tracked, and tied to user experience, resilience, and operational maturity.
• Use incident trends, problem management, experience telemetry, and business feedback to prioritize service improvement initiatives.
• Ensure corrective actions from major incidents, failed changes, DR tests, and service reviews are tracked to closure and reduce repeat issues.
• Partner with Infrastructure Operations, ITSM, and Platform teams to identify systemic experience issues and drive remediation.

IT Resilience & Disaster Recovery Leadership

• Provide direct leadership oversight of the Disaster Recovery (DR) Lead, ensuring DR strategy, planning, and execution are aligned to business‑critical experience outcomes.
• Ensure disaster recovery and resilience planning considers user impact, recovery experience, and business continuity, not just technical recovery metrics.
• Govern DR readiness, testing, and reporting, ensuring executive visibility into resilience risks and recovery confidence.
• Partner with Infrastructure, Security, and Business leaders to ensure recovery priorities align to business value and operational continuity.

Change, Adoption & Communication

• Partner with Change & Transformation teams to embed experience impact assessment into all major technology changes.
• Ensure user impact, communication quality, and adoption success are measured before and after deployments.
• Champion a culture of experience ownership and accountability across IT.

Key Outcomes & Measures of Success

• Improved employee technology experience across Digital Workplace, Service Desk, and core IT services.
• Clear XLA / SLA / KPI reporting with transparent service performance and executive visibility.
• Reduced repeat incidents, operational noise, and escalation leakage into Change / Transform teams.
• Improved first contact resolution, self-service adoption, and time to restore experience.
• Stronger operational resilience, DR readiness, and confidence in recovery capability.
• Managed service partners operating with proactive ownership, continuous improvement, and measurable maturity.

Qualifications

People Leadership

• Lead a multi-disciplinary team covering IT user experience, digital workplace insights, service performance, and experience analytics.
• Directly manage the Disaster Recovery Lead and provide dotted-line leadership across experience-impacting functions.
• Coach operational leaders to own experience and resilience outcomes within their domains

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, or a related field required.
• Master’s degree (MBA, MIS, Technology Management, or equivalent) preferred.
• Equivalent combination of education and deep, hands‑on leadership experience will be considered.

Required Experience/Knowledge

• 10+ years of progressive experience in IT service delivery, ITSM, digital workplace, or technology operations.
• 5+ years in senior leadership role with enterprise-wide accountability.
• Demonstrated experience managing large-scale managed service providers or outsourced IT operations in an enterprise environment.
• Experience governing XLA / SLA / KPI performance, service reviews, escalation management, and continuous service improvement.
• Strong understanding of ITSM, ServiceNow, incident, problem, change, request, knowledge, CMDB, and service catalog processes.
• Experience leading Digital Workplace or Service Desk transformation, including self-service, automation, telemetry, adoption, and user experience improvement.
• Ability to influence internal leaders and external partners through governance, data, accountability, and service outcomes.
• Demonstrated success transitioning organizations from SLA-centric to experience-centric delivery.

Certifications (Preferred)

• IT Service Management / Experience
  • ITIL v4 (Managing Professional or Strategic Leader preferred)
  • Experience Level Agreement (XLA) or Service Experience Management certification
  • ServiceNow (ITSM, Experience, or Digital Workflow modules)
• Vendor & Governance
  • Vendor Management, Service Delivery Management, or equivalent governance certification (preferred)

What’s in it for you?

The expected hiring compensation range for this position is $161,100 - $233,550 annually. This is a hybrid opportunity working in Frederick MD.  

The total compensation package for this position may include other elements, such as a sign-on bonus, long term incentives, and annual bonuses.  This role is eligible to participate in the Annual Incentive Plan. The current target payment for the position is 20% of base salary, modified for corporate and individual performance. Bonuses are pro-rated based on start date.  This role has 20 vacation days and 10 sick days that are accrued on a bi-weekly basis. Employees also have 9 paid holidays throughout the calendar year.

We have a competitive compensation and benefits package focused on your overall wellbeing.  Employee benefits include health, life, and dental insurance; 401K with company match up to 6% as well as a pension package; generous time off; and wellbeing initiatives throughout the year (we like doing fun stuff).  We’re big on professional development and we’ll support and mentor you in your career progression and expect you to help us pay it forward by helping us develop tomorrow's leaders and growth-focused professionals. We value our teams and our communities and believe in giving back. Enjoy time off to volunteer for those causes that matter most to you!

If hired, employee will be in an “at-will position” and the Company reserves the right to modify base salary (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors. The Company reserves the right to change benefits plans at any time.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.