Divisional IT Lead (Director, IT Business Partner)

Centric Brands • New York, NY

2d • $138,000 - $173,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Centric Brands is seeking a Divisional IT Lead, also identified in the posting as Director, IT Business Partner. The role sits within a division’s leadership team, reports into IT, works day to day with the division President, and supports the entire divisional team. It is an individual-contributor position with no direct reports. The lead is the division’s primary point of contact for IT and IT’s primary point of contact for the division, using influence to align divisional needs with enterprise IT teams and initiatives.

The position advises divisional leadership on technology, manages and prioritizes the division’s day-to-day IT requests, and ensures that IT changes are clearly communicated, adopted, and supported through training. The lead plans initiative rollouts, monitors adoption and business value, helps identify lasting solutions to recurring needs, and acts as a change agent by finding and scaling innovation—including practical, responsible adoption of AI—within the division and across Centric Brands.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in business, information systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience in IT business partnership, technology change and adoption, or enterprise application ownership, including sustained work alongside brand presidents, general managers, or senior business leaders.
• Demonstrated ability to lead as an individual contributor through influence and drive outcomes across large organizations without direct authority.
• Track record of rolling out technology changes and driving adoption through communication and training.
• Experience managing a queue of business requests and prioritizing competing demands.
• Sufficient grounding in solution design, data, and integrations to credibly challenge requirements, estimates, and vendor proposals.
• Executive presence and strong communication and facilitation skills, including the ability to explain technical topics to audiences from the President to front-line teams.
• Hands-on familiarity with generative AI tools and practical experience helping business teams adopt them.
• Working knowledge of applications common to consumer brands, including ERP such as SAP or similar, PLM, planning, wholesale order management, EDI and retailer compliance, e-commerce, CRM, BI, and collaboration tools.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in a multi-brand or multi-division business, ideally in apparel, footwear, consumer products, beauty, or retail.
• Change management certification or experience, such as Prosci.
• Business relationship management certification, such as BRMP.
• ITIL certification.
• Lean Six Sigma certification.
• Agile certification.

Responsibilities

• Advise the President and division leadership team on technology and participate in leadership meetings and business reviews.
• Serve as the single point of contact between IT and the division, representing divisional needs, questions, and escalations within IT and communicating IT changes and decisions back to the division.
• Build working relationships across commercial, design, planning, sourcing, supply chain, finance, and e-commerce teams.
• Understand the division’s seasonal calendar, key business moments, and pain points, and time IT work accordingly.
• Represent divisional needs in IT forums and explain IT decisions and trade-offs to the division.
• Align IT product owners and applications, data, infrastructure, security, and service desk teams around divisional needs, while those teams retain execution ownership.
• Own intake for divisional ad hoc requests and capture, log, and track requests through resolution.
• Triage and prioritize requests according to business impact, urgency, and effort; agree priorities with the President and divisional leadership and set timing expectations.
• Combine duplicate requests, direct stakeholders to existing tools and capabilities, and resolve simple requests directly.
• Identify recurring issues and requests and raise them with IT as potential lasting fixes or larger initiatives.
• Report request volume, status, themes, adoption, and delivered business value to divisional leadership and IT through monthly demand reviews and quarterly business reviews.
• Define success measures for initiatives in advance and report adoption and realized business value, such as time saved, reduced cycle time, or cost avoided.
• Translate IT initiatives into plain-language communications explaining what is changing, why, when, and what teams need to do.
• Plan and lead divisional rollouts, including readiness checks, pilots, and scaling across brands and teams.
• Design and deliver training, quick-reference guides, and office hours, and build a network of super users.
• Involve divisional stakeholders in discovery, design, testing, and go-live; track adoption, gather feedback, and address gaps with follow-up training or IT fixes.
• Lead communications to the division during major incidents or delivery risks that affect it.
• Influence divisional leaders and teams to understand, accept, and adopt new ways of working.
• Identify people, teams, and ideas using technology, data, automation, or AI to improve work.
• Lead divisional AI adoption by identifying high-value use cases, scaling successful pilots, and promoting Centric’s responsible-use guidelines and approved tools.
• Share successful practices across the division and Centric Brands through demos, case studies, and communities of practice.
• Collaborate with Divisional IT Leads in other divisions to reuse solutions and avoid duplicate effort.
• Bring new ideas to the division proactively and help test promising ideas quickly.

Benefits

• Industry-competitive salary.
• Comprehensive benefits plan including medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Matching 401(k).
• Summer Fridays.
• Generous PTO.
• Merchandise discounts.
• Career development opportunities.
• Volunteerism opportunities through Centric Cares.
• Employee groups, teams, and initiatives including Be Green, Be Giving, and Be Celebrated.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director