The posting
The Chief Information Officer is accountable for the strategy, security, stability, architecture, and performance of ACCC's technology environment. This leader translates business priorities into a disciplined technology roadmap, protects client and organizational data, strengthens the reliability and recoverability of critical systems, and builds an operating model that delivers measurable business value. The CIO leads Information Technology and serves as the senior technology advisor to the Chief Operating Officer, Chief Executive Officer, Executive Leadership Team, and Board as requested.
The role requires a hands-on and strategic leader who can stabilize current operations while modernizing legacy platforms, improving delivery discipline, strengthening vendor accountability, and developing a capable technology team. The CIO will establish clear priorities, transparent governance, reliable service levels, and sound controls across infrastructure, applications, data, cybersecurity, support, development, and third-party technology services.
This job description does not limit management’s ability to assign or adjust duties and responsibilities at any time.
Technology Strategy and Business Alignment
- Develop and maintain a multiyear enterprise technology strategy and roadmap aligned with ACCC's mission, operating plan, growth goals, client experience priorities, compliance obligations, and financial capacity.
- Convert organizational priorities into a sequenced portfolio of technology investments with clear outcomes, ownership, dependencies, costs, risks, and target dates.
- Serve as a trusted executive advisor on technology opportunities, constraints, risk, capacity, and tradeoffs, using plain language and decision ready recommendations.
- Partners with Product and Digital, Counseling, Client Support, Disbursements, Marketing, Compliance, Finance, Human Resources, and other business leaders to improve client and employee experiences.
- Establish an operating model that protects capacity for stability and security, critical business delivery, and incident response while making competing priorities visible.
Operational Stability and Service Management
- Own the availability, performance, capacity, and support of business-critical systems, infrastructure, networks, databases, telecommunications, endpoints, cloud services, and integrations.
- Implement proactive monitoring, alerting, observability, and service health reporting across the full client journey, including lead intake, counseling, credit report access, enrollment, payments, disbursements, portals, and partner integrations.
- Establish service management disciplines for intake, triage, prioritization, escalation, problem management, change management, release management, root cause analysis, and post incident follow through.
- Create and maintain current runbooks, system maps, application inventories, ownership records, vendor contacts, escalation paths, and recovery procedures to reduce knowledge concentration and operational dependency.
- Define service levels and operational metrics for system availability, incident response, resolution time, change success, support quality, backlog health, and recurring problem reduction.\
Cybersecurity Risk and Compliance
- Lead the enterprise cybersecurity program and maintain a practical, risk-based security roadmap appropriate for a national nonprofit financial services organization handling sensitive consumer information.
- Partner with Compliance, Risk, Legal, Finance, and external specialists to maintain policies, controls, testing, evidence, remediation plans, and executive reporting for applicable legal, contractual, privacy, payment, and security requirements.
- Oversee identity and access management, privileged access, vulnerability management, endpoint protection, security monitoring, penetration testing, secure configuration, data protection, encryption, logging, and security awareness.
- Direct preparation for and response to cybersecurity events, technology incidents, vendor failures, and data risks, including timely communication, containment, recovery, documentation, and lessons learned.
- Establish governance for artificial intelligence, data use, third party technology, and emerging technologies so innovation occurs within clear security, privacy, compliance, and human oversight boundaries.
Business Continuity and Resilience
- Own technology disaster recovery, backup integrity, restoration testing, recovery objectives, redundancy, and continuity planning in partnership with business leaders.
- Identify single points of failure across people, process, technology, data, and vendors and implement prioritized mitigation plans.
- Test recovery procedures and critical vendor contingencies regularly and report readiness, gaps, decisions, and corrective actions to executive leadership.
- Ensure critical systems and processes have appropriate monitoring, support coverage, documentation, failover options, and escalation paths.
Architecture Applications Data and Integration
- Set enterprise architecture standards and guide decisions regarding legacy modernization, cloud services, application platforms, databases, integrations, application programming interfaces, and technical debt.
- Maintain a current view of the technology estate, including business criticality, lifecycle status, ownership, dependencies, security posture, cost, supportability, and modernization plans.
- Strengthen software development and release practices through documented requirements, design review, source control, testing, segregation of duties, deployment controls, rollback planning, and production validation.
- Establish data governance practices that improve data quality, ownership, classification, retention, access, lineage, reporting reliability, and responsible use.
- Ensure technical solutions are scalable, maintainable, secure, supportable, and aligned with business architecture and client needs.
Technology Delivery and Product Partnership
- Partner with Product and Digital leadership to translate approved business outcomes into clear technical solutions, delivery plans, resource needs, release schedules, and support models.
- Create transparent intake and prioritization practices that connect business value, client impact, compliance need, operational risk, effort, capacity, and sequencing.
- Provide reliable delivery forecasts and surface scope, resource, dependency, and risk issues early enough for leaders to make informed decisions.
- Improve the speed and quality of delivery without weakening security, testing, documentation, change control, or operational readiness.
- Use measurable adoption, reliability, efficiency, client experience, and business outcome data to evaluate whether technology investments are producing intended value.
Vendor Financial and Asset Management
- Own technology vendor performance, due diligence, security review, service levels, renewals, contracts, licensing, support arrangements, concentration risk, and exit or contingency planning in partnership with Finance, Compliance, and Legal.
- Develop and manage the technology operating and capital budgets, forecasts, investment cases, and cost optimization plans with clear accountability for results.
- Maintain disciplined software, hardware, license, access, and asset lifecycle management practices.
- Evaluate build, buy, partner, and retire decisions using total cost, risk, capacity, time to value, integration, supportability, and strategic fit.
People Leadership and Organizational Capability
- Lead, organize, coach, and develop the Information Technology team with clear roles, decision rights, performance expectations, career paths, and succession plans.
- Build a culture of service, ownership, transparency, urgency, documentation, respectful challenge, continuous improvement, and shared accountability.
- Assess organizational capacity and capabilities and recommend the appropriate combination of employees, managed services, consultants, and strategic partners.
- Reduce key person dependency through cross training, documentation, standard operating procedures, access controls, and deliberate knowledge transfer.
- Communicate consistently with employees and leaders during incidents, changes, releases, and major initiatives, matching the level of detail to the audience and business impact.
Executive Governance and Reporting
- Provide concise and accurate reporting on operational health, cybersecurity risk, incidents, delivery performance, capacity, vendors, budget, compliance commitments, and strategic roadmap progress.
- Establish governance forums and decision records that clarify ownership, priorities, approvals, risk acceptance, and accountability.
- Present technology matters to the Executive Leadership Team and Board or when requested.
- Participate as an active enterprise leader, balancing technology priorities with the broader needs, resources, and mission of ACCC.
- Bachelor's degree in information technology, computer science, engineering, business, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and relevant executive experience.
- At least twelve years of progressively responsible technology experience, including at least ten years leading managers and multidisciplinary technology teams.
- Demonstrated success leading technology strategy, cybersecurity, infrastructure, applications, software delivery, data, service management, disaster recovery, and vendor management.
- Experience modernizing legacy environments while maintaining reliable day-to-day operations and delivering business priorities.
- Strong working knowledge of cloud and hosted services, networks, databases, systems integration, development lifecycle controls, monitoring, identity and access management, and cybersecurity practices.
- Experience managing technology budgets, contracts, licensing, managed service providers, consultants, and critical third-party relationships.
- Proven ability to communicate technical risk, options, costs, and recommendations clearly to executive leaders, business partners, auditors, and governing bodies.
- Demonstrated judgment, integrity, accountability, discretion, and calm leadership during incidents and high consequence decisions.
Preferred:
- Master's degree in business administration, information systems, cybersecurity, or a related field.
- Executive technology leadership experience in consumer financial services, credit counseling, payments, nonprofit services, contact centers, or another regulated environment.
- Experience with technology governance and service management frameworks and with recognized cybersecurity frameworks such as NIST or equivalent.
- Relevant professional certifications in cybersecurity, governance, architecture, service management, cloud technology, program management, or business continuity.
- Experience supporting high volume client operations, digital self-service, contact center platforms, payment workflows, customer relationship systems, portals, analytics, and third-party integrations.
Essential Functions
- This position requires on-site presence at the Newton, MA headquarters, four days per week, with the option to work remotely one day per week.
Nothing in this job description restricts management’s right to assign or reassign duties and responsibilities to this job at any time. Nothing in this job description is intended to create a contractual obligation or to modify an employee’s employment at will status.
The requirements listed above are representative of the knowledge, skill and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable qualified individuals with disabilities to perform the essential job functions.
ACCC is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workplace. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as defined by applicable law. We believe in fostering a workplace where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered to succeed.
If you need assistance or accommodation during the application process due to a disability, please contact [email protected].
