University of Waterloo

Director, Information Technology Service Experience and Support

University of Waterloo$131K — $164K *
Education, Government & Non-Profit
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • University degree in IT, Business Administration, or related field; graduate degree preferred.
  • 10+ years in IT leadership with user-facing support and service delivery.
  • Experience with service modernization initiatives and IT service management (ITSM) practices.
  • Proficiency in managing operational budgets and workforce performance in service delivery environments.
  • Strong understanding of IT service delivery models and continuous improvement methodologies.

Responsibilities

  • Define and improve user support experience across various channels.
  • Establish a streamlined 'one front door' service model for IT support.
  • Drive service innovations to enhance accessibility and user interaction.
  • Identify and address gaps in support journeys and ownership across teams.
  • Lead operational governance, ensuring decisions and actions are documented and followed up.
  • Develop training pathways for IT staff, ensuring alignment with best practices and service standards.
  • Build relationships across campus units for integrated IT service delivery.

Benefits

  • Health, dental, and vision insurance coverage options.
  • Flexible work hours and remote work opportunities.
  • Professional development programs and training resources.
  • Retirement plan with employer matching contributions.
  • Employee wellness programs promoting work-life balance.
Full Job Description
Job Requisition ID:


Time Type:
Full time

Employee Group:
Staff

Job Category:
IT Support

Employment Type:
Permanent

Department:
Information Systems and Technology

Hiring Range:
$131,704.19 - $164,630.24

Posting Information:This posting is for an existing vacancy.

The internal posting deadline for this position is Friday, April 10, 2026 at 11:59PM.

Job Description:

Primary Purpose

The Director, IT Service Experience & Support is a member of the IST executive leadership team accountable to the Chief Information Officer for the strategy, governance, and operational performance of the University's frontline IT support services.

The Director provides institutional leadership for the design, delivery, and continuous improvement of a unified, user-centred support model, ensuring consistent service standards, effective IT service management practices, and seamless end-to-end support experiences across central and distributed IT teams. The role establishes performance expectations, service governance mechanisms, and accountability frameworks that promote transparency, operational excellence, and a cohesive support experience for the campus community.

The role ensures transparent visibility into service quality through comprehensive dashboards that make it easy to assess service health and effectiveness, and promotes a culture of accountability, collaboration, and service excellence across a diverse, multi-level team of IT professionals.

Key Accountabilities

User experience leadership for IT support
  • Define, implement, and continuously improve the support experience across all user touchpoints (ticket, chat, phone, email, walk-up, on-site).
  • Establish a "one front door" service approach that is easy to navigate, consistently executed, and measurably improved through user feedback and service performance data.
  • Drive service innovation that improves accessibility, reduces effort for users, and modernizes how the community engages with IT.
  • Monitor end-to-end support journeys to identify gaps, handoff failures, or unresolved ownership across teams, and work with delivery leaders to address systemic issues impacting user experience.

IT Service Management (ITSM) vision, governance, and institutional standard-setting
  • Drive operational service governance and coordination forums (e.g. service review cadences, cross-domain coordination mechanisms), ensuring issues are surfaced, decisions are documented, and agreed actions are followed through, in alignment with the institutional accountabilities of the CIO.
  • Ensure the operational stewardship, accuracy, and effective use of the institutional service catalogue for the Service Experience & Support group, including service attributes, request pathways, and user-facing information, aligned with institutionally defined service structures.
  • Create a common training pathway for all IT staff, ensuring up-to-date knowledge and evolving operational guidance are aligned to best practice service practices, supporting a common baseline of capability and service quality across delivery teams that meet the needs of the university community.


Knowledge management
  • Implement and operationalize common support practices to reduce rework, improve first-contact resolution, and increase the ability to securely complete self-service tasks.
  • Establish knowledge quality controls, coaching expectations, and measurement practices (e.g., knowledge reuse, ticket-to-knowledge linkage).
  • Ensure knowledge and service catalogue content stays current, consistent, and aligned to institutional service definitions and overall technology best practices.


Performance accountability, benchmarking and executive reporting
  • Define and manage KPIs within the institutional mandate of the CIO, setting approved KPI frameworks, performance standards, and service benchmarks for client-facing services, and ensure they drive operational decision-making and institutional performance transparency.
  • Build and sustain executive dashboards and review cadences that provide consistent visibility into service performance, user satisfaction, and improvement progress.
  • Support managers within the Service Experience & Support group to be accountable for service outcomes through structured performance reviews, capacity planning, and continuous improvement cycles.


Cross-campus partnership, federation alignment, and service integration
  • Build strong working relationships throughout all campus units, in order to best meet the endpoint technology needs of the campus community. The Director acts as the institutional integrator of frontline IT services, ensuring that operational service strategy, governance, and operational delivery align across IT functions to produce consistent user outcomes.
  • Establish practical mechanisms to ensure consistent IT support experiences across central and distributed teams (e.g., shared routing patterns, clear escalation paths, alignment to institutionally defined service information, and shared visibility into service performance)
  • Ensure Service Experience & Support operations are planned and coordinated with termly peaks in academic and research activity to support time-sensitive teaching, learning, and research needs.
  • Monitor trends in service demand, user feedback, and support performance to identify emerging needs, service gaps, or changing expectations, and present insights to the governance processes for consideration.


Financial and people leadership
  • Provide leadership for operational planning, budget management, workforce capacity planning, and service investment prioritization across the Service Experience & Support portfolio.
  • Build a culture of service excellence and accountability, including clear performance expectations, coaching, role clarity, and professional development pathways.
  • Lead organizational change initiatives required to modernize frontline service delivery in a complex, multi-stakeholder environment.


Required Qualifications

Education
  • University degree (or equivalent experience) in Information Technology, Business Administration, or a related field.
  • Graduate degree is an asset.
  • Formal training or demonstrated IT service management and continuous improvement practices is preferred.

Experience
  • 10+ years of progressive leadership experience in Information Technology, including responsibility for user-facing support and service delivery functions in complex environments.
  • Experience leading service modernization initiatives, such as operating model redesign, ITSM implementation, tool or process consolidation, or governance standardization.
  • Experience overseeing institutional IT support operations, including multi-channel intake, escalation, and resolution models.
  • Experience implementing and governing IT service management practices at an organizational level (e.g., service catalogue, incident/request management, knowledge management, service performance reviews).
  • Experience managing operational budgets, workforce capacity, and performance outcomes within a service delivery environment.


Knowledge/Skills/Abilities
  • Strong knowledge of enterprise IT service delivery models and applied IT service management frameworks.
  • Ability to design and implement a unified, multi-channel support experience that is user-centred, measurable, and continuously improved.
  • Understanding of service governance, performance management, and institutional accountability structures within a complex academic environment.
  • Strong capability in defining and monitoring service performance metrics, dashboards, and continuous improvement cycles.
  • Applied knowledge of knowledge management practices and service catalogue discipline to improve resolution rates and reduce service fragmentation.
  • Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to align distributed teams to shared service standards.
  • Demonstrated change leadership capability in environments with distributed authority and varied local practices.
  • Sound financial and operational judgment related to service capacity planning and resource stewardship.
  • Ability to lead managers and frontline service teams, fostering accountability, collaboration, and service excellence.

About University of Waterloo

The University of Waterloo is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on 404 hectares of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates three satellite campuses and four affiliated university colleges. The university offers academic programs administered by six faculties and thirteen faculty-based schools. Waterloo operates the largest post-secondary co-operative education program in the world, with over 20,000 undergraduate students enrolled in the university's co-op program. Waterloo is a member of the U15, a group of research-intensive universities in Canada. The institution originates from the Waterloo College Associate Faculties, established on 4 April 1956; a semi-autonomous entity of Waterloo College, which was an affiliate of the University of Western Ontario. This entity formally separated from Waterloo College and was incorporated as a university with the passage of the University of Waterloo Act by the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in 1959. It was established to fill the need to train engineers and technicians for Canada's growing postwar economy. It grew substantially over the next decade, adding a faculty of arts in 1960, and the College of Optometry of Ontario, which moved from Toronto in 1967. The university is a co-educational institution, with approximately 36,000 undergraduate and 6,200 postgraduate students enrolled there in 2020. Alumni and former students of the university can be found across Canada and in over 150 countries; with a number of award winners, government officials, and business leaders having been associated with Waterloo. Waterloo's varsity teams, known as the Waterloo Warriors, compete in the Ontario University Athletics conference of the U Sports.
Learn more about University of Waterloo

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