Vice President, Application Development Job Listing at Prudential in Roseland, NJ

Insurance, Finance

Prudential Group Insurance manufactures and distributes a full range of group life, long-term and short-term disability, long-term care, dental, and corporate and trust-owned life insurance in the U.S. to institutional clients primarily for use in connection with employee and membership benefits plans. The business also sells accidental death and dismemberment, and other ancillary coverages and provides plan administrative services in connection with its insurance coverages.
 
Reporting to the CIO of Group Insurance, this executive level technology role is responsible for all new systems development and maintenance of existing systems across the Group Insurance application portfolio.  The volume and complexity of this position is high since the Group Insurance business unit is comprised of a portfolio of several individual Strategic Business Units (SBU's) all selling a unique product offering such as life insurance, disability insurance, long term care, dental insurance, etc.  These products are sold in specific markets - national accounts, middle market employers, and small business -each requiring technology solutions that lead to the selling pattern and profitability.  This role partners heavily with the Enterprise Architect to ensure that the applications are constructed with flexibility and scalability to minimize costs and avoid obsolescence.  Group Insurance's application portfolio, made up of both in-house developed and vendor applications - is grouped around the following key functions and/or clients related to the applications that sell, service, and administer the business with an emerging emphasis on digital strategy information management/business analytics. 
 

• Client Applications - accountable for the applications that support flexible plan-level administration and plan design for our institutional clients across national, middle, and small markets and a broad mix of product offerings.


• Member Applications - accountable for the applications that service and administer the employee members and beneficiaries of the plans, including medial underwriting systems, customer service applications, IVR, etc. 


• Claims Applications - accountable for the applications that process claims in support of our products, including life insurance and health claims (disability/long term care).   


• eCommerce and iSolutions Applications - accountable for a broad set of applications that make it easy for both plan administrators, third party administrators, members, and sales staff to access our applications, enroll in their plans, communicate with the back office, and receive education about products and their needs to make informed buying decisions.  It also covers all eCommerce functions which is comprised of the electronic data interchange between Group Insurance, employers and TPAs.  Also accountable for the execution of the eStrategy, including electronic documents, self-service, social media interaction, etc. 


• Information Management & Business Intelligence - accountable for creating enhanced strategic capabilities around data and analytics.  This includes the design and development of an atomic-level data warehouse to support the entire business, specific data marts to support various business functional areas (Sales, Product, Actuarial, Service, etc.), an Information Stewardship program that will provide a common definition of each critical data element used across the business. 

Within these areas of portfolio specialization, the role is accountable for the following functions:

• Business and Technical Systems Analysis - working directly with the business partners to create documents outlining what is needed.  Business Analysts must develop a thorough understanding of the business opportunity, document Business Requirements Documents and work with Technical Systems Analysts who create the Technical Specification Documents used by the development team to create new or enhanced applications. 


• Application Development - using the requirements and specifications, create new application code to deliver the needed capability to solve the original business opportunity identified by the business partner. 


• Solution Engineering - partnering with the architects, business analysts, and technical analysts, this role connects architecture and development by ensuring the most appropriate technical solution is developed in response to the business opportunity

 

 

This position requires the following:

• 10+ years experience in information technology leadership roles of increasing responsibility as a trusted partner of the business
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related discipline or equivalent experience.  Master's degree in a technology related discipline or MBA a plus
• A collaborative and consultative approach to relationship building with business partners
• Proven ability to lead teams with an emphasis on talent management: coaching, mentoring, associate career development, and innovation with respect to creating a motivated, high performing team
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Deep understanding of the industry frameworks that drive application development such as CMMi
• Strong process discipline and experience working with commonly used systems development life cycle methodologies such as waterfall, iterative, agile, etc.
• Understanding of IT cost models and estimation processes
• Strong negotiation skills
• Experience in Group Insurance or Employee Benefits is a huge plus