Associate Director- Automation Portfolio and Business Enablement

At Lilly, the work is demanding because patients are waiting. We unite caring with discovery to help make life better for people around the world, knowing that every decision, every detail, and every day matters. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, our over 50,000 employees around the globe take on complex challenges to discover and deliver life-changing medicines, strengthen how health is understood and managed, and support the communities we serve. This is hard, urgent, selfless work—but it’s work worth doing. If you’re driven by purpose and ready to bring your best to work that truly matters for patients, we invite you to join us.

This role is accountable for accelerating Technology at Lilly's transition to autonomous support by owning the automation portfolio, business prioritization, stakeholder alignment, adoption strategy, and benefit realization for AI-enabled and agentic support capabilities. The role ensures that automation and agent investments are focused on the highest-value opportunities and deliver measurable improvements in service experience, manual-effort reduction, and Tier 0/Tier 0.5 adoption.

This role accelerates the transition to autonomous support by converting operational demand, business pain points, and service insights into a governed, value-based automation portfolio for execution teams to deliver. The primary focus will be to prioritize what should be automated, why it matters, and how success will be measured to enable business adoption and value realization.

What You'll Do

Automation Portfolio & Use Case Prioritization

• Establish and maintain a prioritized portfolio of automation, agentic support, self-service, runbook-conversion, and Tier 1 deflection opportunities.

• Identify demand patterns, recurring support pain points, service desk volumes, and manual-work hotspots that represent high-value opportunities for Tier 0/Tier 0.5 transformation.

• Define the business rationale, expected outcomes, relative value, and adoption path for each candidate use case before it is submitted for technical delivery.

• Create a transparent prioritization model that balances business impact, service experience, feasibility, readiness, and measurable benefit potential.

• Serve as the single business-facing front door for automation demand to reduce fragmented requests and help execution teams focus on the highest-value work.

Governance, Decision Rights & Portfolio Discipline

• Define governance routines for automation intake, portfolio review, investment sequencing, and benefit tracking for consistent prioritization of automation work.

• Maintain standards for use-case readiness, expected benefits, stakeholder ownership, adoption requirements, and business acceptance criteria.

• Provide portfolio transparency so leaders understand what is being automated, why it matters, what value is expected, and where adoption risk exists.

Adoption, Change Enablement & Stakeholder Alignment

• Lead business adoption planning for automation and agent-enabled support capabilities so delivered solutions are used, embedded, and sustained after deployment.

• Partner with operations leaders, application support teams, service owners, business stakeholders, and India execution teams to align on outcomes, readiness, communication needs, and adoption measures.

• Translate operational pain points and stakeholder needs into clear business requirements, value hypotheses, and adoption plans for execution teams.

• Identify change barriers that could limit utilization of automated capabilities and coordinate the actions needed to improve adoption.

• Create clear narratives that explain how automation investments improve user experience, reduce manual work, and accelerate the shift from human-assisted support to autonomous support.

Benefit Realization & Outcome Measurement

• Define and track business-value measures for the automation portfolio, including Tier 0/Tier 0.5 adoption, reduced manual effort, ticket deflection, improved user experience, productivity gains, and greater utilization of delivered capabilities.

• Partner with operations and data teams to compare expected benefits with realized outcomes and identify where additional adoption or process changes are needed.

• Develop executive-facing scorecards and value stories that show how automation investments are improving support demand, experience, and productivity.

• Use measured outcomes to refine the portfolio, retire low-value work, and redirect capacity toward the most impactful autonomous-support opportunities.

Partnership with Operations, SRE & Agentic Engineering

• Partner with the centralized Service Reliability and Operations M2 leader to convert operational demand and support trends into transformation opportunities without assuming ownership of run-state operations.

• Partner with SRE to identify reliability-adjacent opportunities where autonomous support, self-service, or process simplification can reduce support demand and complement technical reliability improvements.

• Partner with Agentic Engineering and automation execution teams by providing a prioritized, business-validated backlog and clear success criteria, while those teams maintain accountability for build, test, deployment, and technical delivery.

How You'll Succeed

Strategic Portfolio & Business Prioritization

• Demonstrated ability to convert operational demand, stakeholder pain points, and service data into a clear, value-based automation portfolio.

• Strong judgment to prioritize high-impact opportunities and sequence work based on business value, adoption readiness, risk, and execution capacity.

• Ability to create clarity where multiple stakeholders have competing priorities or different definitions of value.

Adoption, Governance & Value Realization

• Proven ability to move work from strategy into sustained adoption, ensuring that delivered capabilities are used and measurable benefits are realized.

• Experience defining governance mechanisms, decision frameworks, scorecards, and value measures that improve portfolio discipline and leadership confidence.

• Ability to communicate value in outcomes-based terms, including reduced manual effort, improved user experience, ticket deflection, and Tier 0/Tier 0.5 adoption.

Cross-Functional Influence

• Ability to influence across Operations, Service Management, SRE, Application Support, engineering, platform, and business stakeholder groups without relying on direct reporting authority.

• Strong facilitation skills to align stakeholders around business problems, adoption needs, decision rights, and expected outcomes.

• Comfort operating as a senior individual contributor or associate-level transformation resource embedded in a broader operating model.

Your Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business, Engineering, or a related technical engineering or business field.

• 7-10+ years of experience in IT service management, product management, business operations, automation enablement, digital transformation, or technology portfolio management.

• Experience with ITSM practices, support tiering models, automation concepts, AI-enabled service capabilities, and service management governance.

• Strong stakeholder management experience with the ability to align business, operations, engineering, SRE, and service management teams around shared outcomes.

• Experience developing practical portfolio governance routines, prioritization frameworks, metrics, and adoption scorecards.

What You Should Bring:

• Experience translating operational data, support demand, stakeholder needs, and process friction into prioritized improvement opportunities.

• Demonstrated experience with business case development, benefits tracking, adoption planning, and executive-level value communication.

• Familiarity with ITSM practices, support tiering models, automation concepts, AI-enabled service capabilities, and service management governance.

• Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to align business, operations, engineering, SRE, and service management teams around shared outcomes.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain automation and AI-enabled support outcomes in clear, non-technical business language.

• Experience influencing without direct authority and driving measurable outcomes through cross-functional partnership.

• A bias for measurable impact, simplified support experiences, and continuous movement of work from human-assisted support to autonomous support where appropriate.

Additional Information:

Lilly may provide support for or sponsor work authorization or visas for this role for internal applicants only.

Organization Overview

Lilly IT builds and maintains capabilities using cutting edge technologies like most prominent tech companies. What differentiates Lilly IT is that we redefine what’s possible through tech to advance our purpose – creating medicines that make life better for people around the world, like data driven drug discovery and connected clinical trials. We hire the best technology professionals from a variety of backgrounds, so they can bring an assortment of knowledge, skills, and diverse thinking to deliver innovative solutions in every area of our business.

Lilly is dedicated to helping individuals with disabilities to actively engage in the workforce, ensuring equal opportunities when vying for positions. If you require accommodation to submit a resume for a position at Lilly, please complete the accommodation request form (https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation) for further assistance. Please note this is for individuals to request an accommodation as part of the application process and any other correspondence will not receive a response.

Lilly is proud to be an EEO Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, gender expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, ancestry, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.

Our employee resource groups (ERGs) offer strong support networks for their members and are open to all employees. Our current groups include: Africa, Middle East, Central Asia (AMECA), Black Employees at Lilly (BE@Lilly), Chinese Culture Network (CCN), EnAble, Evolve, Lilly Indian Network (LIN), Organization of Latinx at Lilly (OLA), Pride (LGBTQ+ Allies), Veterans Leadership Network (VLN) and Women’s Initiative for Leading at Lilly (WILL).

Actual compensation will depend on a candidate’s education, experience, skills, and geographic location. The anticipated wage for this position is $129,000 - $189,200

Full-time equivalent employees also will be eligible for a company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance). In addition, Lilly offers a comprehensive benefit program to eligible employees, including eligibility to participate in a company-sponsored 401(k); pension; vacation benefits; eligibility for medical, dental, vision and prescription drug benefits; flexible benefits (e.g., healthcare and/or dependent day care flexible spending accounts); life insurance and death benefits; certain time off and leave of absence benefits; and well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities).Lilly reserves the right to amend, modify, or terminate its compensation and benefit programs in its sole discretion and Lilly’s compensation practices and guidelines will apply regarding the details of any promotion or transfer of Lilly employees.

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