Summary
The IT Manager – Business Alignment & Strategic Engagement (BASE) is responsible for executing the BASE program strategy by building trust, credibility, and working alignment with business and IT counterparts to deliver value-driven outcomes for Subaru.
This role ensures that business needs, technology investments, and realized value outcomes are consistently aligned across the organization by deepening business relationships, shaping demand, managing intake, and supporting prioritization activities across the IT portfolio.
Acting as a critical link between business stakeholders, BASE analysts, and IT delivery teams, the BASE Manager ensures that initiatives are clearly defined, aligned to enterprise strategy, and translated into actionable solution packages for delivery. The role champions transparency, consistency, and value-driven decision-making from project initiation through final delivery with ROI validation upon close reinforcing IT’s position as a trusted strategic partner.
Additionally, the Manager is accountable for building and developing a high-performing team of BASE Analysts through coaching, mentoring, and career development, while fostering a culture of collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Primary Responsibilities
Business Relationship Building
• Build trusted relationships with business teams to understand strategy, goals, and success measures.
• Engage in key business forums and operational activities to identify needs, pain points, and opportunities.
• Acts as a strategic advisor by proactively bringing forward ideas, reusable solutions, and innovations.
Demand Management & Intake Governance
• Manage demand shaping and formal intake processes to ensure business needs are captured, qualified, and routed consistently.
• Additionally, extend demand management beyond immediate intake by helping business partners define (and maintain) a forward-looking roadmap that aligns to business strategy, objectives and technology roadmap.
• Ensure requests entering the intake process are aligned to business objectives and adequately defined.
• Establish and enforce standardized intake practices, tools, and documentation.
Prioritization & Portfolio Alignment
• Lead prioritization activities using value-based frameworks and trade-off analysis.
• Evaluate initiatives for cross-functional impact and enterprise alignment.
• Support governance by preparing recommendations and prioritization inputs.
• Partner with Solutions team to understand current and future capacity constraints to properly stage future work and set realistic expectations for delivery timing with business stakeholders.
Solution Definition & Business Requirements
• Oversee development of business requirements, charters, and supporting artifacts.
• Ensure initiatives include clear objectives, scope, risks, benefits, and business impact.
• Promote consistent outputs for successful transition to delivery teams.
Cross-Functional Collaboration & Alignment
• Act as a coordination point between business stakeholders, analysts, and delivery teams to ensure shared understanding of business needs, constraints, and opportunities.
• Maintain strong relationships with IT delivery teams to align feasibility and capacity.
• Facilitate collaboration among BASE team members to ensure clear understanding of cross-functional impacts and shared value realization.
• Promote a culture of partnership between IT and the business, emphasizing transparency, accountability, and shared ownership.
Enterprise Alignment & Value Optimization
• Balance reuse with new solution acquisition to optimize ROI, reduce complexity, and accelerate time-to-value.
• Help maintain an enterprise capability catalog to enable reuse, standardization, and reduce duplicate solutions.
• Ensure holistic evaluation across departments to avoid duplication.
• Support alignment to enterprise architecture and strategy.
• Identify opportunities to leverage emerging technologies to improve…