The purpose of this job is to provide leadership and overall direction to the Product Development, Quality Assurance, and Documentation teams. This position is responsible for the analysis, design, development, testing, documenting, and support of all products and supporting tools. This includes web applications, data collection/communication systems, data transformation/loading systems, data analysis/reporting systems, mapping/QA tools, and implementation/process tools. This also includes technology strategic direction, sales support, budgets, reporting, staffing, performance management, development plans, recruiting, mentoring, coaching, terminations, and other human resources related activities.

This position works in collaboration with the other business units IT departments along with Product Management, Operations, Architecture, Solution Center, and other cross business unit stakeholders including Customer Operations/Implementation and Sales/Marketing to ensure that the product supports customer needs and contractual commitments. This position is a member of the Informatics' Leadership Team.

Strategic Direction

Works with key stakeholders to understand business requirements and expectations in order to develop strategic direction for the Development, Quality Assurance, and Documentation teams.

Maintains knowledge of current and emerging trends in the industry, including all relevant areas of information systems that might be incorporated as new technologies into future systems.

Collaborates with sales, marketing, technical operations, strategic product management, technical product management, business development and other departments to determine competitiveness of new technologies and to develop new products.

Develop and oversee overall test strategy and tactical plans for the quality assurance function.

Establishes direction, goals and processes for each part of the Product Development, Quality Assurance, and Documentation teams.

Provides input and direction to application designers providing information on impact analysis, activity sizing, future impacts, risk analysis, etc..

Collaborates with third party vendors to ensure that the vendor's strategic direction is in alignment with the organization's direction .

Communicates current and future statuses as it relates to current and future projects and direction related to these projects.

Negotiates and oversees third party arrangements with consulting companies and software vendors.

Provide an environment that fosters product innovation and development to meet and exceed customer expectations.

Work with product management and new business development to build and enhance the appropriate products for the Informatics business in a timely and efficient manner.

Communicates current and future statuses as it relates to current and future projects and direction related to these projects.

Attend presentation with third party vendors to understand new technology.

Layout and deploy new software technology for all SafetySurveillor™ products - current, short and long term.

Investigate, plan out and deploy new cost savings ideas to minimize the future overall IT cost to the Informatics' business unit.

Leadership of the Product Development Team

Participate in the hiring of the Product Development staff.

Develop appropriate performance review objectives; provide day-to-day coaching with the management team; and conduct annual performance reviews.

Resolves employee relations issues as needed.

Determine what resources are necessary to carry out development projects.

Assist designated team leads in overall process of product development and provide mentoring for all levels of team members.

Communicates and interprets organizations policies.

Assist designated team leads in meeting IT deliverables.

Attend product design meetings and assist in the planning and decision making process.

Attend product architecture meetings and assist in the planning and decision making process and final resolution.

Review and investigate root cause of high priority problem issues; implement processes to reduce the risk of similar issues in the future.

Escalation point for production support issues - investigate, understand, assist in the decision making process, etc..

Escalation points for product and services issues - delegate and follow through to resolution.

Project Management

Assist in determining what resources are necessary to carry out development projects.

Develop and monitor quality goals for each application release.

Assist in establish unit testing and integration testing for functionality, limits, and performance.

Communicate current and future status as it relates to current and future projects and direction related to each project.

Sales Support

Participate in technical portion of sales calls.

Support technical questions and follow-up during sales Process.

Respond to Request for Proposals and technical questionnaires from potential clients.

Manage and maintain the sales oriented technical documentation and/or whitepapers.

Budget

Develop and monitor third party vendor budgets (contracts).

Develop, monitor, and develop reports for Product Development, Quality Assurance, and Documentation budgets (expenses).

Project the Product Development, Quality Assurance, and Documentation requirements and their associated expenses for all future needs of the Informatics' IT business unit.

Review and monitor hardware and software contracts with third party vendors.

Review and monitor compliance to hardware and software license fees.

Required Skills

A Bachelor's degree (BS, BA) required; MBA or other advanced degree preferred in Computer Science or Engineering.

Ten or more years of work experience in a large-scale product development healthcare environment is preferred.

Minimum of 7+ years of management experience.

Knowledge and Skills

Strategic thinking and a demonstrated ability to provide and articulate the future vision for Product Development.

Proficiency and understanding of Open Source software concepts and practices.

Excellent general management, leadership, and project management skills.

Excellent communication skills as it relates to disseminating and gathering information to staff and management and marketing to prospective clients or business partners.

Flexibility in terms of dealing with changing priorities and dealing with multiple projects simultaneously.

Ability to understand technical issues and understand impact on projects, and effectively communicate these issues and impact to direct reports as well as other project stakeholders.

Web Application Development Technologies: Eclipse IDE, Java and Java related technologies (Servlets, Beans, JMS, JMX, JNDI, JDBC, etc.), Enhydra/Tomcat, XMLC, popular frameworks (Spring, Struts, Baracuda), UI technologies (AJAX, JavaScript, DHTML).

Advanced/Expert in product development.

Advanced/Expert broad technical knowledge.

Advanced/Expert in all aspects of the software development life cycle.

Advanced/Expert designing data base architecture; dimension modeling and database design.

Demonstrated successful history in development and full deployment of products involving three-tier and four-tier architecture, web applications, real-time data communication systems, data warehouses, and data analysis/reporting systems.

Understanding of medical data challenges a plus.

Strong interpersonal, teamwork and problem-solving skills in order to deal with customers, business partners, staff and management from a variety of skill levels as well as different authority levels within customer and Premier Organizations.

Demonstrated fiscal responsibility and accountability for annual budgets over $4 million dollars.

Customer service oriented.

Proven ability to work in a matrix environment.

Data, Database, and Reporting Technologies: Data access technologies (JDBC, iBatis, Hibernate, etc.), SQL Server (TSQL, Replication, Stored Procedures, UDFs, etc.), JasperReport/iReport.

Data Transmission and Transformation Technologies: Data Junction, EDI/HL7, XML/XSD.

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