WestEd - a nonpartisan, nonprofit research, development, and service agency - works with education and other communities throughout the United States and abroad to promote excellence, achieve equity, and improve learning for children, youth, and adults. WestEd has more than a dozen offices nationwide, from Massachusetts, Vermont, and Georgia, to Illinois, Arizona, and California, with headquarters in San Francisco.
WestEd's Information Services Department supports and deploys hardware, software, and the network infrastructure for 800 employees located in 16 national offices. WestEd focuses on improving learning for children, youth, and adults. As a department, we promote a collaborative and supportive culture, focusing on close-knit teamwork. Additionally, as a team, we value a healthy work-life balance.
Position Description The Senior Business Systems Analyst works with the business owners to align technology solutions with business needs. This role will ensure that the business applications meet business requirements, review and analyze existing applications effectiveness and efficiency, and develop strategies for improving or leveraging the business systems.
The Business Systems Analyst is responsible for ongoing management of the installed business applications that support the operational department such as Accounting, Finance, and HR. The activities include working closely with the business stakeholders to define requirements, design standardized procedures and function as an IT liaison with the business stakeholders.
Responsibilities Primary business contact for IT department
- Prioritize incoming business requests and the demand pipeline
- Ensure end-user adoption of new functions, systems, or processes
- Perform data analysis for business applications and related infrastructure
- Participate in the change management process, including training
Participate in new application projects
- Evaluate and analyze additional modules for needed features and functions
- Help business articulate the nature of project requests and the benefits expected
- Participate based on the role and responsibilities in the project charter, which may include identifying the business requirements
- Aid in evaluating and optimizing business processes
Upgrade release planning
- Identify and validate software enhancements
- Evaluate and analyze new release features and functions to determine impact on agency and users
- Plan timing of applying the release to our environment based on the features, change management and IS guiding principle for application maintenance
- Define procedural changes for the business associated with the enhancement
Support existing system
- Act as a Subject Matter Expert for ongoing issues, production support, application administration, and Service Level Agreements
- Review and modify, as needed, vendor contact information and contacts
- Key contact for business owners
Qualifications - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technologies or related field, plus continued education and/or training in the field.
- 5+ years of progressive experience in applications support, software implementation, database and application development, including web services.
- Experience implementing business systems in a SaaS environment
- Technical knowledge of integrating disparate applications
- Experience managing IT Applications functions - software development, implementation and support/maintenance services; scope management, timeline, budget, SDLC (Agile, etc.)
- Ability to analyze business needs or problems and apply application development methodology to provide an effective solution, specifically for Accounting, Finance, HR
- Extensive and in-depth knowledge of and experience with business systems implementation and maintenance including data conversion mapping and generating interface requirements
- Experience with formalized testing methodology and use of automated testing tools
- Demonstrated tact, diplomacy, common sense, sound judgment and confidentiality.
- Strong oral and written communication abilities with all levels of management, employees, and customers
- Experience with Ultimate Software preferred
- Cognos reporting software experience a plus
- Experience with Business Intelligence Tools a plus
- Experience with Budgeting and Planning Software experience a plus
Application Process
