Role summary
The Senior Strategy Director, Service Operations is responsible for developing and executing strategic initiatives that strengthen service delivery, operational performance, and business outcomes. The role combines strategic planning, cross-functional leadership, and operational accountability to ensure services are reliable, scalable, and aligned with evolving business and customer needs.
The Senior Strategy Director will lead a team of approximately 8–10 professionals and partner across Information, Technology, Product, Data, Commercial, and business functions to translate strategy into actionable priorities and measurable results. The role will serve as a senior point of accountability for service performance, operational improvement, and significant business or customer-impacting issues.
Essential functions
Strategy and functional leadership
- Develop and execute strategies, priorities, and roadmaps aligned with broader business objectives and evolving customer needs.
- Translate strategic objectives into actionable plans, capabilities, investments, and measurable outcomes.
- Lead and develop a team of approximately 8–10 professionals, establishing clear priorities, accountability, and performance expectations.
- Identify emerging business, information, technology, and operational requirements and recommend strategies to address them.
- Develop business cases and recommendations for investments that improve service capabilities, performance, scalability, and efficiency.
- Serve as a senior advisor and subject-matter expert, providing strategic and operational recommendations to senior leadership.
Service operations and performance
- Provide leadership and oversight for the performance, reliability, quality, and continuous improvement of services within the function's scope.
- Establish service standards, governance, performance measures, management routines, and escalation processes to drive consistent service delivery.
- Monitor service performance and operational trends to identify risks, systemic issues, and opportunities for improvement.
- Provide leadership for significant service incidents and business or customer escalations, ensuring appropriate ownership, coordination, communication, and resolution.
- Drive root-cause analysis and corrective actions for material or recurring service issues, with a focus on preventing recurrence and strengthening service reliability.
- Ensure new or significantly changed services have appropriate operational readiness, ownership, support models, monitoring, documentation, and controls.
Strategy execution and continuous improvement
- Develop and maintain a prioritized roadmap for strategic and operational improvements based on business priorities, service performance, customer feedback, and operational risk.
- Identify opportunities to simplify, standardize, automate, and improve service processes and operating models.
- Partner with Product, Technology, Information, Data, and other functions to ensure operational requirements are incorporated into new capabilities and strategic initiatives.
- Use performance data and operational insights to identify longer-term trends and influence future service and capability investments.
- Establish appropriate measures to evaluate the effectiveness and business impact of strategic and operational initiatives.
Business and cross-functional leadership
- Build strong partnerships across business, Information, Technology, Product, Data, Commercial, and customer-facing organizations.
- Translate complex strategic and operational issues into clear business implications, options, recommendations, and actions.
- Facilitate decisions across organizational boundaries where priorities, resources, dependencies, or accountabilities require alignment.
- Represent Service Operations in relevant strategic planning, investment, transformation, and governance discussions.
- Ensure business and customer feedback informs service priorities and continuous-improvement plans.
People leadership
- Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing team of approximately 8–10 professionals.
- Build capabilities in strategy, service management, operational analysis, problem solving, stakeholder management, and continuous improvement.
- Establish clear goals and accountability aligned with broader business and functional objectives.
- Manage team capacity and resources against strategic priorities, service demands, and business requirements.
- Develop organizational capability, succession, and leadership depth while reducing reliance on individual areas of expertise.
Areas of accountability
The role is accountable for:
- Service Operations strategy, priorities, and roadmap.
- Leadership and development of an approximately 8–10 person team.
- Service performance, reliability, and operational effectiveness.
- Strategic initiatives and continuous improvement.
- Significant incident and escalation leadership.
- Operational readiness of new and changed services.
- Service governance, performance measurement, and risk management.
- Cross-functional alignment and senior stakeholder communication.
- Business cases and recommendations for capability and service investments.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience.
- Significant experience in strategy, service operations, service delivery, information, data, technology, or a comparable business function.
- Demonstrated experience developing strategies and translating them into operational plans and measurable outcomes.
- Experience leading and developing professional teams within a complex, matrixed organization.
- Experience leading cross-functional initiatives and influencing senior stakeholders across organizational boundaries.
- Strong strategic, analytical, problem-solving, and business judgment skills.
- Demonstrated ability to manage complex operational issues and senior-level business or customer escalations.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to translate complex issues for executive audiences.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience leading strategy and operations for information, data, analytics, technology, or healthcare-related services.
- Experience with service management, continuous improvement, operational performance, and transformation.
- Experience operating in a complex or regulated environment involving data governance, privacy, security, quality, or compliance requirements.
- Demonstrated success improving service reliability, scalability, efficiency, or customer experience.
Leadership competencies
- Strategic orientation: Connects immediate priorities and operational challenges to longer-term business objectives.
- Operational ownership: Drives accountability and results across organizational boundaries.
- People leadership: Develops talent, builds organizational capability, and creates clear accountability.
- Analytical discipline: Uses evidence and operational insights to drive decisions and distinguish root causes from symptoms.
- Cross-functional influence: Builds alignment and drives action across diverse stakeholders.
- Continuous improvement: Identifies opportunities to simplify, standardize, automate, and strengthen services.
- Executive communication: Converts complex issues into clear implications, recommendations, and decisions.
Measures of success
Success in this role will be demonstrated through:
- Clear strategic direction and priorities for Service Operations.
- Reliable and predictable service performance.
- Improved management and prevention of significant or recurring service issues.
- Successful delivery of strategic and operational improvement initiatives.
- Improved service quality, scalability, resilience, and operating efficiency.
- Strong business and stakeholder confidence in Service Operations.
- Increased capability, accountability, and leadership depth within the team.
IQVIA is a leading global provider of clinical research services, commercial insights and healthcare intelligence to the life sciences and healthcare industries. We create intelligent connections to accelerate the development and commercialization of innovative medical treatments to help improve patient outcomes and population health worldwide. Learn more at IQVIA Careers
IQVIA is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other status protected by applicable law. Learn more about our commitment to diversity at IQVIA EOE
IQVIA is committed to integrity in our hiring process and maintains a zero tolerance policy for candidate fraud. All information and credentials submitted in your application must be truthful and complete. Any false statements, misrepresentations, or material omissions during the recruitment process will result in immediate disqualification of your application, or termination of employment if discovered later, in accordance with applicable law. We appreciate your honesty and professionalism.
The potential base pay range for this role, when annualized, is $134,600.00 - $374,900.00. The actual base pay offered may vary based on a number of factors including job-related qualifications such as knowledge, skills, education, and experience; location; and/or schedule (full or part-time). Dependent on the position offered, incentive plans, bonuses, and/or other forms of compensation may be offered, in addition to a range of health and welfare and/or other benefits.
