Responsibilities - Leading Team Of IT Professionals Accountable For

• Providing IT strategic direction in support of the company's business strategy
• Knowledge of best practices in IT & implementing a strategy needed to accommodate the company's aggressive growth plans
• Presenting the case for purchasing technology that will facilitate the company realizing its growth plans and computing the ROI on each of those projects & presenting that information to the Executive Team
• Identifying, proposing & delivering IT solutions to facilitate accomplishing the company's business objectives by capturing, storing, processing, retrieving & disseminating information
• Identifying the factors most critical to effectively running the business & providing relevant, understandable & useful information to assist in decision making
• Creating an employee training platform for standard operating software in order to provide a common usage across the company
• Understanding and maintaining the IT data warehouse systems and offering reporting and analytical solutions to end users to facilitate access to and dissemination of data
• Selecting & installing a merchandising system that will report rates of sale & inventory while identifying stock requirement and purchasing needs
• Accommodating the needs of consumers who have expectations for obtaining information via the internet
• Evaluating & monitoring the company's information processing environment - in order to determine proficiency levels & implement initiatives to enhance the dissemination of information
• Leading, coaching & developing the IT staff
• Developing plan for maintenance & acquisition of hardware & software needs, fiscal constraints & compatibility with existing IT networks
• Insuring the systems in place - including the store operating system - continue to operate with minimum budget & maximum efficiency
• Making decisions as to whether to develop solutions in-house or go outside
• Identifying where system upgrades are needed & enabling the Executive Team to understand those needs
• Sourcing vendors, creating capital requests & determining the justification & ROI whenever purchasing software or hardware
• Sunsetting systems where necessary in order to project forward based on business needs vs. reacting as systems fail
• Maintaining data integrity & security within the IT network
• Ensuring the security, business continuity & confidentiality of data by devising, implementing & maintaining protective & disaster recovery & contingency strategies
• Developing & implementing a corporate IT security policy
• Insuring that stored information corporate-wide is protected from external & internal threats
• Insuring redundancy with backups not being stored in the same facility as originals
• Storing certain data in Cloud
• Maintaining an internal customer service focus by identifying users' needs and resolving their IT issues
• Structuring the IT department to best support the company's needs - adding to, downsizing and/or outsourcing as is needed
• Initially obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the workings of each dept. by asking each VP & dept. head to outline their department's functions, their current needs for information & identifying the data to which employees have access
• Maintaining effective vendor relationships & managing vendor contract negotiations for the purchase & maintenance of IT hardware & software

Experience Requirements & Preferences

• 7 - 20 years of IT experience including 5-6 years in an IT leadership role
• Retail store (multi-store) experience
• Omnichannel and ecommerce experience
• Consumer finance experience - a plus
• Merchandising, logistics/distribution & advertising/marketing experience

Educational Requirement

Bachelors in Computer Science or Information Systems with a minor in Accounting/Business Administration or an MBA