Aon
Global Application Maintenance & Support (AMS) Leader
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Senior Director, Global Application Maintenance & Support (AMS)
The Senior Director, coordinating Global Application Maintenance & Support (AMS), is accountable for the strategy, governance and delivery of AMS services across North America, EMEA, APAC and LATAM. This role leads global AMS teams (employees and contractors) and strategic vendor partners to ensure the stability, availability, performance and security of in-scope applications that support core business processes. The Senior Director defines and evolves the global AMS operating model; coordinates major incident and problem management and works closely with business and technology leaders to improve service quality, reduce run costs, and support product and portfolio roadmaps.
Aon is in the business of better decisions
At Aon, we shape decisions for the better to protect and enrich the lives of people around the world.
As an organization, we are united through trust as one inclusive, team with varied strengths, and we are passionate about helping our colleagues and clients succeed.
What the day will look like
Global AMS Strategy & Operating Model
- Define and evolve the worldwide AMS approach, operating model and service catalogue across regions and solution lines.
- Drive standardization of AMS processes, tools and practices where practical, while allowing for regional needs.
Service Delivery & Reliability
- Accountable for the availability, reliability, performance and security of in-scope applications in line with agreed SLAs and OLAs.
- Supervise end-to-end Incident, Problem and Organisational Change for production applications, including governance of ITSM processes and tools.
- Ensure effective monitoring, observability and capacity planning to minimize business disruption.
Major Incident & Problem Management (within AMS)
- Lead the resolution of Priority 1 and Priority 2 major incidents and other critical issues, ensuring timely decision making and clear communication.
- Lead problem management and root cause analysis (RCA) for recurring and high-impact issues; ensure sustainable corrective and preventive actions are implemented and tracked.
Vendor & Partner Management
- Lead strategic AMS vendors and contractor resources, providing clear governance, performance management and customer concern paths.
- Partner with Service Management Organization to provide governance and performance Management standards.
- Ensure vendors adhere to SLAs, security and compliance requirements, and contribute to continuous improvement and automation initiatives.
- Partner with Vendor Management and Procurement on contract terms, service levels and cost optimization.
People Leadership
- Directly lead and develop a global AMS organization (employees and contractors), including hiring, coaching, performance management and succession planning.
- Foster a culture of accountability, customer focus, knowledge sharing and continuous improvement across regions and teams.
Risk, Security & Compliance
- Ensure that AMS services and processes meet security, compliance and regulatory requirements, including regular patching, vulnerability management and audit readiness.
- Maintain and lead AMS-related risk registers and remediation plans in partnership with Security, Risk, and Compliance teams.
Financial & Demand Management
- Own AMS budgets and forecasts; monitor and lead run costs, including vendor spend and resource allocations.
- Drive initiatives that reduce support costs, improve efficiency and optimize the application landscape (e.g., rationalization, automation, shift-left).
- Partner with Product, Portfolio and Delivery teams on demand planning and transition-to-support for new or changed applications.
Stakeholder & Business Engagement
- Serve as the primary senior point of contact for AMS topics with business, product and technology leaders.
- Collaborate with Business Heads and senior partners to address open and recurring incidents, problems and service concerns.
- Communicate service performance, risks and improvement plans through regular reviews and clear reporting.
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Application Rationalization & Product Operating Model
- Support and influence application rationalization efforts to simplify the software environment and reduce technical debt.
- Align AMS services and priorities with the Product Operating Model and product/portfolio roadmaps to enable business growth and transformation.
Service & Incident Management
- Oversee daily AMS operations across regions; ensure consistent triage, prioritization and resolution of incidents and service requests.
- Coordinate with application developers, system analysts and product teams for domain expertise during complex incidents and problem investigations.
- Ensure clear, timely communication of incident impact, status and final resolution to Portfolio Leaders and key partners.
Problem Management & Analytics
- Analyse aggregated event and issue data across portfolios to identify recurring challenges, key trends and systemic risks.
- Drive formal problem management, including RCAs, action plans, and verification of effectiveness.
- Engage with the Support Vendor Manager and other partners to call out chronic issues, require RCAs and track remediation.
Service Change & Transition
- Work with vendors and internal teams to coordinate Service Introduction and Service Change activities for new or enhanced applications.
- Ensure readiness criteria (e.g., monitoring, runbooks, KB articles, support model, SLAs) are met before launch or transition to support.
- Govern organisational change practices to minimize risk to production stability.
Governance, Reporting & Continuous Improvement
- Define, track and report global AMS benchmarks (e.g., MTTR, incident backlog, change failure rate, availability, customer satisfaction) to partners.
- Run regular service reviews with regions, vendors and business partners; agree on improvement actions and drive them to closure.
- Find opportunities for automation, self-service and “shift-left” support to improve user experience and reduce manual effort.
Knowledge & Standards
- Ensure robust knowledge management, including runbooks, SOPs and knowledge base articles, and drive reuse across regions and vendors.
- Promote consistency to standards, policies and architectural guidelines, and influence updates based on AMS insights and lessons learned.
Skills And Experience That Will Lead To Success
Behavioral Skills
- Executive leadership: Effectively leads and develops global teams (employees and contractors); sets clear direction, expectations and standards.
- Trusted partner: Builds and maintains trust with senior business and technology leaders; operates as a credible advisor.
- Strategic and focused: Balances long-term AMS strategy with short-term execution; sets priorities, makes trade-offs and drives accountability for outcomes.
- Customer-focused: Strong customer-service orientation with a focus on business value, user experience and reliability.
- Influence and customer management: Persuades and aligns various partners (including vendors and senior leaders) around decisions and change.
- Change leadership: Comfortable with ambiguity; effectively leads teams through change and drives adoption of new methods, systems and operating models.
- Data-driven: Uses metrics and analytics to inform decisions, challenge assumptions and improve performance.
- Collaboration across cultures: Works effectively across regions, cultures and time zones; navigates organizational politics constructively.
- Advanced problem-solving: Anticipates and proactively addresses issues; calls out appropriately and drives resolution of complex, multi-functional problems.
- Clear communication: Communicates complex topics in a simple, structured way to both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leadership.
- Detail-aware with strategic view: Comfortable operating at the right level of detail while maintaining a broad, strategic perspective
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Functional Skills
- IT Service Management (ITSM): Deep experience with ITIL processes—especially Incident, Problem, Change and Configuration Management—and their application at scale.
- Vendor and contract management: Validated ability to lead strategic vendors and contractor resources, including performance management, commercial oversight and negotiation.
- People leadership: Experience leading, coaching and developing global teams; workforce planning across employees and contractors.
- Financial management: Experience owning and optimizing run budgets (Opex), including forecasting, cost transparency and cost optimization initiatives.
- Stakeholder / relationship management: Skilled at managing expectations and relationships with senior business, product and technology stakeholders.
- Business and domain acumen: Ability to understand core business processes and how AMS-supported applications enable them; links AMS performance to business value.
- Architecture awareness: Working knowledge of system architectures supporting one or more core business areas (integrations, data flows, dependencies, cloud/on-prem patterns).
- Service performance & reliability: Experience with system performance management, monitoring, observability, capacity planning and availability/reliability engineering practices.
- Testing & release in support context: Familiarity with testing methodologies (functional, regression, UAT, performance) and transition-to-support / service introduction practices.
- Process and service metrics: Experience defining, tracking and reporting SLAs, OLAs, KPIs and OKRs; using these to drive continuous improvement.
- Continuous improvement & quality: Hands-on experience applying continuous improvement and quality methodologies (e.g., Lean, Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma) to AMS processes.
- Consultative problem solving: Able to diagnose complex issues across vendors, teams and technologies and recommend pragmatic, prioritized remediation.
- Standardization & simplification: Ability to simplify and standardize complex AMS processes and application landscapes across regions and solution lines.
- Technology familiarity: Broad understanding of relevant technologies and third-party solutions within the portfolio, sufficient to challenge vendors and support teams optimally.
How we support our colleagues
In addition to our comprehensive benefits package, we encourage a diverse workforce. Plus, our agile, inclusive environment allows you to manage your wellbeing and work/life balance, ensuring you can be your best self at Aon. Furthermore, all colleagues enjoy two “Global Wellbeing Days” each year, encouraging you to take time to focus on yourself. We offer a variety of working style solutions, but we also recognise that flexibility goes beyond just the place of work... and we are all for it. We call this Smart Working!
Our continuous learning culture inspires and equips you to learn, share and grow, helping you achieve your fullest potential. As a result, at Aon, you are more connected, more relevant, and more valued.
Aon values an innovative, diverse workplace where all colleagues feel empowered to be their authentic selves. Aon is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.
Aon provides equal employment opportunities to
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