Sr. Director Enterprise Data

Norfolk Southern offers a unique opportunity to be part of our proud legacy that spans nearly 200 years. We are a customer-centric, operations-driven team dedicated to advancing safety, serving communities, and driving innovation for tomorrow's rail.  As part of Norfolk Southern, you’ll join a collaborative team where there are opportunities for growth across the organization. We are building a culture where everyone can thrive by owning and driving exceptional results, being humble and leading with trust, serving our customers with excellence, and collaborating and coaching to win.

Job Description

Norfolk Southern is a unique experience, where heritage, stability, and innovation live together. We are one of the largest railroad operators in the country and that provides premium shipping service and reliable logistics solutions for customers in 22 states including the District of Columbia. In combination with business partnerships and connections with other carriers, NS ships every product imaginable to and from any destination, linking communities and customers to the marketplaces of the world.

 

The Senior Director of Enterprise Data will be responsible for setting and owning the enterprise data strategy and providing oversight, direction, and execution for the enterprise data program, and serving as an evangelist for Norfolk Southern’s data and analytics journey. This role is pivotal in providing strategic direction, thought leadership, technical leadership, and oversight of data strategy implementations, encompassing data architecture, data governance, master data management, streaming, and data warehousing to support Business Intelligence and AI/ML. The ideal candidate will have a proven record of successful implementations, strong leadership and communication skills, and deep expertise in data and analytics.

Responsibilities

 

• Develop a vision and strategy for governing and managing data as an enterprise asset.
• Work across partner organizations to ensure alignment and ratification of the enterprise data strategy & roadmap.
• Design and define overall data capability architecture, data governance principles, policies, and standards.
• Ensure that the data architecture is scalable, reliable, and capable of handling current and future potential workloads to meet current and future business needs.
• Ownership of data architectural review board to ensure that standards are followed and align to the strategy.
• Provide technical leadership and oversight throughout the implementation lifecycle, ensuring successful delivery, and alignment with project timelines and objectives.
• Actively manage vendor technology partners, negotiate, and maintain compliance with stated SLA's.
• Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to measure the effectiveness of the data strategy and its impact on business outcomes.
• Identify the data assets that are deemed significant to the enterprise, as determined by the business impact, decision impact, risk mitigation or organizational impact of the information.
• Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies in the data management and analytics space and incorporate them into strategic recommendations and solution designs.
• Manage departmental budgets and forecasts. 

Principal Duties

• Outstanding leadership and team management skills, provides ongoing coaching and mentoring to team staff.
• Strong leadership, communication, and partner management skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate effectively with all levels of the organization.
• Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Demonstrates ability to lead through ambiguity, learns from experiences and recovers quickly and -moves forward while guiding the time forward.
• Championing bold ideas and making courageous decisions to drive meaningful results.
• Recruits talent and acts on opportunities for team training and skills development.
• Provides supervision, mentoring, technical leadership, and assistance to managers, and staff members.
• Reviews and evaluates opportunities to improve best practices to achieve higher maturity.

Skills:

 

Education

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field (e.g., Computer Science, Information Management, or Business) preferred.

Skills Preferred:

• 10+ years of people leadership in large enterprise Data and Analytics environments.
• 10+ years of experience implementing a wide variety of on-premises and cloud data management platforms and technologies.
• Experience assessing traditional and modern data architectures based on business needs in a consultative app