Director of IT Strategy & Architecture

Position Summary

The Director of IT Strategy & Architecture is a newly created role within the Information Technology team, reporting to the CIO, designed to provide strategic and operational leverage across Forcepoint's global IT team. Supporting a global SaaS security software company, this position ensures IT delivers measurable business value and aligns our Enterprise Architecture roadmap with corporate goals.

The primary responsibility is to take inputs to define IT's north-star for Enterprise Architecture and align all IT functions and business groups to execute on that vision. The role will help optimize our environments, consolidate systems and ratify integrations.

As a newly established position, this role will shape how IT operates at scale - bringing structure, discipline, and visibility across programs, spend, and governance. Acting as a trusted advisor to the CIO and IT leadership, this individual is proactive in identifying opportunities, raising risks, and ensuring the right issues receive executive attention. They partner closely with IT leadership team members, consolidating their updates, priorities, and risks into a unified status view for the CIO. They also serve as IT's storyteller - creating compelling content, reports, and presentations that showcase IT's achievements, position the organization as a strategic enabler, and demonstrate tangible business value.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership, Architecture, AI and Alignment

• Partner with the CIO to define and execute the IT strategic roadmap in alignment with company objectives, global growth, and security priorities.

• Serve as a trusted advisor and integrator for the CIO, proactively raising risks, surfacing issues, and ensuring decisions are well-informed and timely.

• Partner with all IT direct reports, ensuring their workstreams are aligned, interdependencies are managed, and consolidated status is rolled up to the CIO.

• Leverage industry data and benchmarks (e.g., Gartner research, vendor insights) to inform IT decision-making, strengthen business cases, and ensure investments align with external best practices.

• Define and institutionalize a northstar application architecture; publish a ~3year roadmap and a 4-6 quarter execution plan aligned to our transformation programs

• Continue to develop and operationalize our corporate AI program, define intake/approval processes/ROI, and launch prioritized, compliant AI use cases with measurable outcomes to accelerate our business further. Assist with building a unified architecture for AI, rather than 1:1 integrations; focus on data sovereignty and trust; agentic orchestration; cost to value mapping; enterprise corporate and Engineering tooling strategy

Governance and Prioritization

• Ensure our intake, programs and PI events align with the architecture roadmap

• Run IT prioritization sessions with senior leaders to drive transparency, trade-offs, and alignment across global initiatives.

• Conduct Business Relationship Management (BRM) reviews with key stakeholders to strengthen IT's role as a business partner and identify emerging needs.

Operational Effectiveness and Delivery

• When required, manage IT's operating rhythm, including staff meetings, leadership forums, and program reviews, ensuring disciplined follow-through on commitments.

• Drive internal IT Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with team leads, creating a structured forum to review delivery, risks, and performance against objectives which will then be shared across the company.

• Develop the most critical metrics and KPIs to measure IT team success and the value IT delivers to the business.

• Track execution of IT initiatives, proactively surfacing risks and removing blockers to ensure leaders deliver on commitments.

• Create dashboards, scorecards, and reporting mechanisms that monitor IT's performance and business impact.

• Drive process improvements that enhance agility, scalability, and end-user experience, with a strong focus on SaaS and security best practices.

Financial and Vendor Oversight

• Partner with Finance and FP&A to coordinate and manage IT spend across the department, ensuring accurate forecasting, budget discipline, and cost optimization.

• Facilitate stakeholder reviews of resource allocation and spend priorities, providing transparency and alignment with business goals.

• Monitor SaaS and vendor spend, ensuring ROI, cost efficiency, and adherence to security and procurement standards - and aligns with Enterprise strategy

• Establish financial reporting that links IT investments to outcomes and demonstrates business value - ensures alignment with Procurement

Executive Communication and Value Demonstration

• Act as the CIO's communication hub, consolidating status across IT leadership into a clear and actionable executive view

• Produce high-quality content on a regular basis that can be shared with the Executive Team and Board, ensuring IT's work is consistently visible, contextualized, and tied to business outcomes.

• Comfortable with defining and delivery by metrics

• Develop compelling presentations, reports, and narratives that position IT as a strategic enabler, highlighting achievements, efficiencies, and business impact.

• Prepare, when required, board-level and executive committee updates that showcase IT's contributions to revenue growth, security, and employee productivity.

• Partner with Corporate Communications to ensure consistent, business-friendly messaging around IT's work and value.

• Can substitute for the CIO when required

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in information technology, Business Administration, or related field

• 8-12 years of experience in IT strategy, program management, or technology operations, ideally in SaaS or enterprise software.

• Deep understanding of IT governance and architecture, financial management, and SaaS spend optimization, with proven experience partnering with FP&A.

• Strong facilitation skills, capable of leading cross-functional governance forums and steering committees.

• Exceptional communication, content creation, and storytelling skills-able to translate technical accomplishments into compelling business narratives.

• Demonstrated ability to proactively raise risks and issues, ensuring they are surfaced early and managed effectively.

• Experience leveraging external market intelligence (e.g., Gartner, PE insights, vendor data) to inform IT strategy, validate priorities, and benchmark performance.

• Proven experience working in global organizations with distributed teams and stakeholders across multiple time zones.

• Analytical, structured, and able to balance big-picture vision with hands-on execution.

Reporting Structure

Reports directly to the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Partners with all IT leaders (Infrastructure and Operations, Enterprise Applications, PMO, User Experience and Enablement and Business Intelligence) and business stakeholders to roll up status and provide the CIO with a unified view. Works cross-functionally with Finance, FP&A, HR, Security, Engineering, and other corporate stakeholders.

Success Profile

The ideal candidate is a proactive strategic operator and communicator: highly organized, trusted by the CIO and peers, and adept at translating complex IT activity into clear, business-aligned outcomes. They thrive in fast-moving SaaS environments, can navigate in the gray, understand the unique challenges of scaling secure IT operations, and elevate IT's position in the company by demonstrating measurable value.

As this is a newly created role, success will be measured not only by how well the individual delivers against current priorities, but also by how effectively they define and establish the function itself. The right candidate will set the standard for governance, spend management, QBR execution, metric development, risk surfacing, and Executive visibility, while ensuring decisions are informed by the best available internal and external data.

Interview Process

As part of the interview process, the CIO will expect candidates to provide anonymized real-world examples of their work. This includes:

• Sample metrics and KPIs they have developed to measure IT performance and business value.

• Architecture roadmaps, and how they are communicated, presented and measured

• Examples of dashboards, reports, or executive updates (with sensitive information removed) that demonstrate their ability to consolidate and communicate IT performance across all parts of the department

• Evidence of how they have leveraged industry data, benchmarks, or vendor insights to influence decision-making or shape IT strategy.