Senior Manager, Service Management & Automation

OVERVIEW

The Senior Manager, Service Management & Automation owns the IT service management practice and the automation and agent estate for Enterprise Technology & Operations.

The role has three parts. The first is practice: owning incident, problem, service request, change and continual improvement as governed ITIL practices, together with the classification standard and data quality that make them measurable. The second is performance: aggregating and reporting service results across all four ET&O functions and running the monthly and quarterly review cadence. The third is automation: owning the backlog of work to be automated, the agents and robotic processes that perform it, and the controls that keep them inside the bounds set by the AI Governance Council.

The role is deliberately distinct from Global Service Operations and is designed to complement it. Global Service Operations runs the service: the shift roster, the tiers, the people and day-to-day resolution. This role owns the practice those teams work to, the platform they work in, the data that evidences what happened, and the automation that removes the work. Where the two meet — tier definitions, service level targets, the automation backlog — the standard is set here and delivered there. The same relationship applies to Infrastructure & Platforms and Business Applications.

This is a peer-level function lead reporting to the Vice President, Information Technology and Head of Enterprise Technology & Operations, based in the eCS India office and supporting eClinical Solutions employees globally. It is accountable for the service management platform — currently Zendesk, migrating to Atlassian Jira Service Management — and works within eClinical Solutions quality standards, including GxP and 21 CFR Part 11 obligations where they apply to IT systems and records.

KEY TASKS & RESPONSIBILITIES

ITSM Practice Ownership

- Own the IT service management practice across incident, problem, service request, change and continual improvement, including practice definition, adherence and audit. Delivery against those practices sits with the respective function leads.

- Own the service catalogue, request taxonomy and classification standard across all four ET&O functions, and hold classification completeness at 100% on ticket closure.

- Define the service level framework and the L1, L2 and L3 tier definitions with the function leads; Global Service Operations owns the roster and the operational escalation path within it.

- Own problem management end to end: chair the problem review, drive root cause to closure with the owning function, and track repeat causes out of the estate.

- Maintain the practice documentation set — process definitions, work instructions and the knowledge standard — to audit quality.

Service Performance Reporting & Governance

- Aggregate and report overall service performance across all four ET&O functions — Global Service Operations, Infrastructure & Platforms, Service Management & Automation, and Business Applications — into a single view for the Head of ET&O and the Chief Transformation & AI Officer.

- Work with each functional lead to define, baseline, measure, report and improve the KPIs and metrics for their area, holding the definitions consistent so that results are comparable across functions and over time.

- Run the monthly service review: attainment against service levels, backlog age and composition, automation coverage, agent-caused incidents, and actions carried forward.

- Run the quarterly business review: trend across the quarter, progress against the 2027 objectives and MBOs, total cost of ownership for AI and automation, and the forward plan.

- Produce the evidence pack for internal and client audits and for customer qualification activity, drawn from the service record.

Service Management Platform & Data

- Act as product owner for the ITSM platform, including the migration from Zendesk to Atlassian Jira Service Management and ownership of the configuration baseline thereafter.

- Ensure the classification standard is agreed and enforced before platform cutover, so that the standard is migrated rather than the current data quality.

- Establish and run the configuration management database and asset data model to the standard required by automated routing, impact analysis and audit.

- Own the data quality of the service record — priority, tier, resolution type, subcategory and resolution group — and the controls that keep it populated.

- Replace unstructured email intake with structured catalogue items and guided forms, working with the functions that receive the demand.

- Manage the ITSM platform vendor relationship, licensing and roadmap alignment.

Automation & Agent Operations

- Own the enterprise automation backlog for ET&O: identify, size, prioritise and sequence candidates by volume, effort and business impact, drawing candidates from every function.

- Set the automation standards, patterns and review gates that all build teams work to.

- Work with the Business Application Support team to drive service improvement and automation delivery, chairing the joint backlog review and directing demand to their build capacity.

- Collaborate with the Center of AI and Automation (CoA+) to design, build and deploy the AI and RPA solutions identified in the automation backlog, in line with the agreed MBOs.

- Design and operate the agent lifecycle, covering:

Proposal, validation, deployment, monitoring and retirement

- A named human owner and a retirement path for every production agent

- Confidence thresholds, exception handling and hand-back paths between agents and humans

- Maintain the agent registry and the autonomy bounds recorded by the AI Governance Council, within CORPPOL-13 and the Acceptable Use Addendum.

- Extend agent lifecycle governance to the existing robotic process automation estate, which today operates without a backlog, release discipline or defined ownership.

Programme & Project Delivery

- Manage the projects that bring new tooling into ET&O, from business case and selection through implementation, adoption and handover to run.

- Own the integration roadmap between ET&O systems and the wider enterprise estate, including identity, HR, finance and elluminate where service data crosses a boundary.

- Lead cross-functional delivery with Information Security on identity, endpoint and incident response interfaces, and with Operational Excellence on process design and continuous improvement.

- Coordinate with Quality Assurance on validation and change control for systems and automations in GxP scope.

- Manage project scope, schedule, risk and benefit realisation, and report progress through the monthly and quarterly reviews.

Governance, Compliance & Risk

- Ensure every production automation or agent change carries an SOP or work instruction update and an audit trail to GxP standard.

- Ensure compliance with eClinical Solutions and industry quality standards, regulations, guidelines and procedures, including 21 CFR Part 11 where applicable.

- Escalate risk arising from service performance, automation failure or agent behaviour to the Head of ET&O and the relevant governance forum.

Team Leadership & Stakeholder Management

- Line-manage the automation and agent engineering capability.

- Provide practice and automation guidance to colleagues across the other ET&O functions, building capability rather than dependency, and without assuming line accountability for their delivery.

- Engage stakeholders across the business to understand demand, set expectations and communicate service performance.

- Foster a culture of measurement, accountability and continuous improvement.

- Other duties as assigned.

Education & Experience

- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology or a related discipline, or equivalent experience preferred.

- 12+ years in IT, of which at least 5 in service management practice ownership rather than service desk operation preferred.

- Demonstrated ownership of an ITSM platform implementation or migration, ideally Atlassian Jira Service Management or ServiceNow.

- Proven experience leading a team, including performance management and capability development.

- Demonstrated experience aggregating and reporting service performance across multiple teams to an executive audience, and running a monthly and quarterly review cadence.

- Track record delivering tool implementation and integration projects to schedule, working across functions such as information security, quality and operational excellence.

- Experience of workflow automation at production scale, using Power Platform, UiPath or comparable low-code and RPA tooling.

- Regulated-environment experience with working knowledge of 21 CFR Part 11 or GxP preferred.

- Good fluency in English.

Professional Skills

- ITIL 4 Managing Professional, or ITIL 4 Foundation with a commitment to complete Managing Professional within twelve months of appointment preferred.

- Process design and governance, with evidence of practices that remained in place after the implementing project closed.

- Data discipline: able to define a taxonomy, enforce it, and report against it credibly to executive stakeholders.

- Able to hold a boundary with a peer function and resolve competing priorities through a shared backlog rather than escalation, influencing without line authority.

- Programme and project management discipline: concurrent workstreams run to scope, schedule and defined benefit.

- Strong written and verbal communication; able to explain service performance and automation risk to a non-technical audience.

- Well organized, with high attention to detail and the ability to prioritise under load.

- Confident, high energy, self-motivated, and able to work and excel in a fast-paced environment.

Technical Skills

- Atlassian Jira Service Management administration, or equivalent ITSM platform depth.

- Configuration management database and asset data modelling.

- AI agent patterns, their failure modes and the controls that contain them; exposure to Microsoft Copilot Studio or comparable.

- Microsoft Power Platform and RPA tooling such as UiPath, sufficient to set standards and review what the team builds.

- Reporting and analytics using Power BI or equivalent.

- Scripting sufficient to review automation code, for example PowerShell, Python or equivalent.

- Working knowledge of identity and access management, which represents the largest automatable demand in the estate.

- PC skills including the MS Office package (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint).

AI Use Statement

Employees are expected to appropriately leverage company-approved AI tools to improve productivity and quality while adhering to company policies, protecting confidential information, validating AI-generated content, and exercising sound professional judgment. AI is intended to augment—not replace—professional judgment, critical thinking, accountability, and decision-making. Accountability for all work remains with the employee.