BRM Asia East & APAC Team Lead

The Business Relationship Management team is looking for a lead to manage the relationship with key stakeholders in the APAC and Asia East region. The position requires someone with excellent communication skills, people orientated, strategic in their approach and a high tolerance for complexity and ambiguity.

The opportunity:

An opening exists for a Business Relationship Leader (BRM) to serve Enterprise Technology as BRM Asia East & APAC Team Lead. This BRM must maintain a relationship with business stakeholders from these areas.

The candidate will engage with the member firm (i.e. the customer) and internal Enterprise Technology (ET) stakeholders on:

• Understanding the needs of the customer (in connection with new demand as well as performance expectations) and matching these needs with the solutions provided by ET.
• Help the customer navigate within the ET delivery organisation to facilitate effective and efficient operation of relevant ET solutions used within their region.
• Account planning and prioritization of solutions brought forward during service adoption campaigns launched by ET (push demand) both from a needs and affordability perspective.
• Defining Member Firm specific investments, sharing the associated costs and driving compliance to ensure business case goals are achieved.
• Continuously assess the satisfaction with existing services.
• Understanding the cost implications of all ET solutions and sharing the required insights in a transparent and timely manner to allow appropriate decision making.

Your key responsibilities:

• Understanding the regions markets, priorities and overall business issues and managing overall IT Services’ customer satisfaction in the Area and Regions.
• Overall responsibility for smooth running of operations and foundational services within the region.
• Facilitating discussions on IT Services levels and performance with the regional leadership and communicate IT needs for the region to the appropriate service delivery and operations leaders and managers.
• Proactively communicating technology direction/strategy to Regional and Country leadership and end-users and providing timely updates on large cross-organization programs and technology infrastructure initiatives.
• Maintaining IT team people point of contact for all IT Staff based in the Region.
• Maintaining close working relationship with Finance in the region to manage budgets and deal with finance issues effectively.
• Effectively manage budgets across the region for all the ET technology costs.
• Managing close working relationship with the Talent function and ensuring the IT staff across the region are supported in their roles and any talent issues are addressed.
• Managing the BRM team and ensuring they are aligned to all key ET Objectives.

Skills and attributes for success

• Relationship Building: Develops strong relationships with diverse stakeholders by anticipating needs, collaborating across teams, fostering commitment and asking for feedback. Cultivates internal and external networks and uses them to connect customers with subject-matter specialists. Finds the right cadence with customers to become a trusted business advisor. Shows versatility in understanding and working in culturally diverse environments.
• Business Process Improvement: The identification of new and alternative approaches to performing business activities. The analysis of business processes, including recognition of the potential for automation of the processes, assessment of the costs and potential benefits of innovative approaches and, where appropriate, management of change and its implementation.
• Structured Problem Solving: The ability to define, analyze, and address clients' business issues.
• Market Insights & Intelligence: Understand how to analyze technology costs and communicate its value to a business.
• Trust: Ability to establish this very quickly from competency, consistency and a positive intent. Politically very astute.

To qualify for the role, you must have:

• 15+ years of experience in management positions in a business or IT role, demonstrating progressively greater responsibility.
• A degree in information systems or related discipline or equivalent work experience.
• A strong customer service orientation. An understanding of customer expectations gained through developing formal and informal relationships with customers.
• Excellent executive presence and business acumen.
• Strong people relationship and management skills with excellent interpersonal, communication and organizational skills.
• Excellent written and verbal English language skills.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver presentations of complex financial and business information to a diverse audience.
• Good understanding of the Asia-Pacific IT market and ability to bring knowledge of this to help facilitate the growth and integration of EY across the Area.
• Strong Financial management experience.
• Exposure to and awareness of working in global environments.
• Recognized and respected leadership developed through progressive positions of responsibility throughout the business or the IT organization.
• Exceptional judgement, tact, and decision-making ability
• Demonstrated ability to clearly communicate vision, mission, goals and themes to both business and IT audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to develop and maintain strong working relationships with colleagues at different levels of the business and the IT group, to the most senior levels.
• Flexibility to adjust to multiple demands, shifting priorities, ambiguity and rapid change.
• Possesses cultural intelligence – Understands and integrates cultural differences and motives to participate in cross-cultural teams; functions effectively in settings. characterised by cultural diversity; adapts verbal and non-verbal behaviour so it is appropriate for different cultures.
• Possesses a flexible repertoire of behavioural responses that are appropriate in a variety of situations and the capability to modify both verbal and non-verbal behaviour based on those involved in a specific interaction or in a particular setting.
• Politically savvy – can manoeuvre through complex political situations effectively and astutely; is sensitive to how people and organization’s function; anticipates where the land mines are and plans approaches; accordingly, views corporate politics as a necessary part of organizational life and works to adjust to that reality.
• Ability to translate understanding of EY and IT Services organization, business objectives and processes to co-ordinate, integrate and align multiple views and perspectives across the Region.
• Ability to draw on personal networks and relationships to efficiently resolve roadblocks and influence outcomes.
• Ability to work and team with a multitude of different people within and outside of IT to balance demands.
• Outstanding management, interpersonal communication and organizational skills.
• Strong ability to influence and negotiate customers’ expectations; balances the needs of the business and IT, maintaining fairness and objectivity.
• Must be able to work within a matrix organization – balancing the needs of the customer against firm initiatives and goals; must be able to identify appropriate product/service offerings to meet the needs of the client; must make decisions, such as prioritizing relationships to develop, negotiate with customers and overcome obstacles.
• Work with IT Services teams to share information on the specific needs, regulations and customs of the JAK Region.
• Direct supervision of the JAK BRM team including leads in Japan, Korea and ASEAN
• Ability to manage teams who do not report directly to you to ensure seamless and positive service experience for the customer.
• Strong counselling experience and ability to manage diverse teams in different locations.

Ideally, you’ll also have:

• A Technology / Business related degree; or equivalent work experience.
• 15 years of proven experience in a leadership position, with a minimum of 10 years in Technology infrastructure management requiring customer interaction.
• Strong working knowledge of ITIL and project management

What we look for:

Experienced senior level leader in Technology Infrastructure management with a wide array of exposure to end user technology, networking and data processing operations. The candidate must have an outgoing interpersonal style with excellent communication skills at executive level. He/She should see approaching problems long before other people in the team see it and offer/advocate for solutions to these problems.

The candidate must be able to deal with a high degree of complexity and ambiguity.