ITSM Service Excellence Leader

About the Role As a global leader in wealth management and asset services, Northern Trust is seeking a senior ITSM leader and ITIL expert to lead the automation, optimization, and maturation of the IT Service Management function. This role is accountable for transforming how IT services are governed, executed, and continuously improved—shifting from manual, compliance-heavy processes to automated, data-driven, and resilient ITSM operations within a high-volume and time-critical environment. This highly visible leadership role balances run-the-bank stability with change-the-bank transformation across global technology teams.

What You'll Do

• ITSM Process Leadership & Optimization: Interface with senior executives across the organization to drive strategic outcomes and day-to-day service delivery priorities, delivering operational excellence while enabling risk reduction in a deadline-sensitive delivery model.

• Serve as the enterprise authority on ITIL-based processes, ensuring they are scalable, risk-aligned, and fit-for-purpose within a complex, high-throughput operational environment.

• Lead continuous optimization of ITSM processes, reducing friction, manual effort, and cycle time while improving quality, compliance, and delivery at pace and scale.

• Define and enforce clear process guardrails, decision frameworks, and risk-based controls, balancing speed with strong governance and control adherence.

• Manage priorities across a multi-threaded, high-demand environment, ensuring effective execution amid competing priorities and tight timelines.

• Automation & Intelligent Enablement: Drive an automation-first strategy for ITSM practices, leveraging AI, orchestration, and workflow automation to reduce human dependency and error; increase standardization and predictability; enable safe, fast, and repeatable execution in a continuous delivery and improvement environment.

• Partner with engineering, platform, and tooling teams to embed automation directly into ITSM workflows and deployment pipelines, supporting accelerated delivery cycles with appropriate governance controls.

• Identify and retire low-value manual controls, replacing them with preventative and detective automated controls aligned to high-volume change and release ecosystems.

• Metrics, Insights & Value Realization: Define and operationalize KPIs, KRIs, and experience metrics that measure effectiveness, risk reduction, and business value in a delivery-focused organization.

• Sponsor dashboard creation and automated reporting to provide real-time visibility into performance, compliance, and operational trends.

• Use data-driven insights to continuously refine process design while supporting rapidly evolving priorities and delivery demands.

• Collaboration & Influence: Act as a trusted advisor to technology, risk, audit, and business stakeholders within a dynamic and evolving workload environment.

• Facilitate global forums, workshops, and working groups to drive alignment, adoption, and continuous improvement.

• Mentor and develop ITSM practitioners, elevating process maturity, automation capability, and execution discipline across the organization.