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Reports to: Head of Platform Engineering / Chief Technology Officer, Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO)

Function: Platform Engineering — OCTO

Bring order to complexity. Govern with rigour. Make technology work for everyone, everywhere.

Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, is seeking a Head of IT Service Management to lead the enterprise-wide ITSM capability within the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) . In this highly visible and pivotal role, you will lead and run the IT service management service across the enterprise — setting the standards, processes, and governance frameworks by which technology services are requested, delivered, governed, measured, and continuously improved across Pearson globally. This is not a role confined to a single team or technology domain: you will hold cross-company governance accountability for Incident Management and Change Management, end-to-end ownership of Pearson’s ServiceNow platform and its full suite of associated sub-systems and integrations, and strategic ownership of the Atlassian toolchain — including Jira, Jira Service Management, Jira Product Discovery, and Confluence.

The ideal candidate is an experienced service management leader who combines deep ITIL 4 expertise with a platform product mindset , exceptional stakeholder influence, and a passion for operational discipline at global scale. As AI agents increasingly handle triage, routing, and resolution, this leader will define how Pearson governs autonomous action within its service management estate.

We are looking for a transformational people leader — someone who leads and develops a globally distributed team across multiple geographies and time zones, runs a rigorous best-practice service management function, and simultaneously reimagines what enterprise ITSM looks like in a cloud-native, AI-enabled organisation. You will bring deep technical credibility in service management platforms alongside the executive presence to influence senior stakeholders across technology, product, and business functions, drive lasting cultural change, and deliver measurable improvements in service quality at global scale.

Pearson Leadership Dimensions

As a senior leader at Pearson, you will be expected to embody and role model our leadership dimensions:

• Live Our Purpose: You align your values, actions, and goals with Pearson’s mission. You inspire others by articulating a compelling vision, connecting daily work to our broader purpose, and making decisions that reflect a deep understanding of our strategy.

• Simplify the Complexity: You navigate ambiguity and distill complexity into clear, actionable plans. You help teams understand how their work contributes to strategic goals, enabling focus, clarity, and effective execution in a dynamic environment.

• Carry Our Culture: You foster a culture of customer centricity, high performance, and exceptional collaboration. You lead with integrity, empower others, and build inclusive, high-performing teams that reflect Pearson’s values and behaviors.

• Deliver Results: You set ambitious goals and execute with quality, precision, and speed. You hold yourself and others accountable for outcomes, ensuring alignment with strategic priorities and delivering measurable impact for learners and stakeholders.

Service Management Framework — Key Pillars

This role is grounded in ITIL 4 industry best practice. The Head of IT Service Management holds accountability across all core service management practices, organised into the following pillars:

• Service Strategy & Governance: Defining and owning the enterprise service management strategy, policy framework, and governance model — ensuring alignment with Pearson’s business objectives and OCTO technology strategy.

• AI & Automation Governance in Service Management: Define and own the governance model for AI-assisted and autonomous ITSM actions — including human-in-the-loop thresholds, AI audit trails, and model performance monitoring within ServiceNow and Atlassian AI capabilities. Govern the enablement of AI features across both platforms in line with Pearson’s data handling standards and AI policy.

• AIOps and Observability Partnership: Partner with Platform Engineering on observability strategy, ensuring telemetry and event data flows coherently into ITSM tooling to enable proactive and predictive service management.

• Incident Management (Cross-Company): Enterprise-wide governance authority for the Incident Management process — from P1 major incidents to recurring service disruptions — across all technology teams, business units, and geographies.

• Problem Management: Proactive and reactive identification of root causes underlying recurring incidents, managing a structured problem backlog and driving permanent resolution to reduce the overall incident burden.

• Change Management (Cross-Company): Cross-company governance of the Technical Change Management process and Change Advisory Board (CAB) — ensuring all changes to the technology estate are assessed, authorised, implemented, and reviewed with rigour, evolving to include policy-as-code, AI-assisted risk scoring, and high-velocity change governance for cloud-native delivery pipelines.

• Request Fulfilment & Service Catalogue: Ownership of the enterprise service catalogue and request fulfilment processes — ensuring employees and technology teams can access services efficiently through well-defined, automated request workflows.

• Knowledge Management: Governance of the enterprise knowledge base — ensuring accurate, accessible, and up-to-date knowledge articles reduce repeat contacts, accelerate resolution, and enable employee self-service.

• Configuration Management (CMDB): Ownership of the CMDB and the discovery and service mapping processes that keep it accurate — providing the foundational data layer for all ITSM and ITOM practices. Positioned as a strategic data product that enables AI-driven impact analysis, automated change risk scoring, and real-time service topology reasoning.

• Service Level Management: Definition, negotiation, governance, and reporting of SLAs and OLAs across all technology services — giving the business clear, accurate, and actionable visibility of technology service performance.

• Availability Measurement: Ensuring technology services are measured and managed against their agreed availability targets.

• Continual Improvement: Leadership of the enterprise Continual Improvement programme — systematically identifying, prioritising, and delivering improvements to service quality, process maturity, and customer satisfaction.

• ServiceNow Platform: Full end-to-end ownership of the ServiceNow platform as Pearson’s system of record for IT service delivery — including platform strategy, configuration, automation, all modules, and all integrations with adjacent sub-systems.

• Atlassian Platform: Enterprise ownership of the full Atlassian suite — Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and Jira Product Discovery — for engineering work management, IT service delivery, knowledge management, and product planning across Pearson.

What You’ll Do

Strategic Leadership & Transformation

• Own and execute the long-term vision for enterprise Service Management at Pearson — defining what ITSM looks like in an AI-augmented, cloud-native organisation and building the roadmap to get there.

• Define Pearson’s human-AI operating model for service delivery — establishing governance frameworks that determine when AI agents act autonomously, where humans retain authority, and how all autonomous actions are audited and overridden when necessary.

• Serve as a senior member of the Platform Engineering leadership team, providing thought leadership on service governance, operational risk, ITSM maturity, and platform strategy.

• Act as Pearson’s internal authority and external advocate for service management best practice — driving ITIL 4 adoption, process consistency, and governance maturity across all Pearson functions.

• Foster a culture of service excellence, continuous improvement, and customer-centricity — while simultaneously building the organisational capability and mindset to operate effectively in an increasingly automated service environment.

Platform Governance

• Own the complete ServiceNow platform strategy, product roadmap, and governance — including the evaluation, enablement, and ongoing governance of AI capabilities (Now Assist, AI Agents) in line with Pearson’s data handling standards and AI policy.

• Own the enterprise Atlassian platform strategy and governance — including Atlassian Intelligence and Rovo capabilities — ensuring AI feature adoption is purposeful, auditable, and aligned to Pearson’s security and data requirements.

• Partner with Platform Engineering to build Pearson’s AIOps capability — ensuring telemetry, event data, and observability signals flow coherently into ITSM tooling to enable proactive, predictive, and eventually self-healing service management.

• Drive continuous development across the full ServiceNow estate — including all ITSM modules (Incident, Problem, Change, Request, Knowledge, Service Catalogue, CMDB), ITOM modules (Discovery, Event Management, Service Mapping, Health Log Analytics), and any adjacent modules (HR Service Delivery, Finance, SecOps) — ensuring the platform evolves ahead of operational demand.

Core ITSM Operations

• Hold enterprise-wide governance authority for Major Incident Management — owning the full lifecycle from detection, triage, and mobilisation through resolution, stakeholder communication, and post-incident review, ensuring every major incident generates actionable learning that feeds directly into problem management and service improvement.

• Drive a culture of blameless post-incident review, producing regular incident analytics and trend reporting that give the CTO and executive stakeholders clear visibility of service resilience and improvement trajectories.

• Hold cross-company governance authority for Technical Change Management — owning the CAB model, risk assessment frameworks, and change standards across all Pearson technology teams, while evolving governance toward AI-assisted risk scoring, policy-as-code controls, and high-velocity guardrails for cloud-native delivery pipelines.

• Own the CMDB as a strategic data product — not merely maintaining configuration accuracy, but ensuring the CMDB serves as the trusted reasoning substrate for AI-driven impact analysis, automated change risk scoring, and real-time service topology mapping.

• Lead the Problem Management process — maintaining a structured problem backlog, driving root cause analysis across major and recurring incidents, and ensuring permanent fixes are tracked through to implementation.

• Own the enterprise Knowledge Management strategy — ensuring a well-governed knowledge base drives self-service resolution, reduces repeat contacts, and feeds AI-assisted triage and deflection capabilities.

• Define, agree, and govern SLAs and OLAs for all technology services, and build real-time service performance dashboards that give the business and OCTO leadership actionable visibility of technology service health.

People & Organisation

• Build and lead a high-performing, globally distributed Service Management organisation — setting the culture, operating rhythm, and performance standards for a function spanning multiple geographies and time zones.

• Own the full people leadership lifecycle: workforce planning, talent acquisition, onboarding, performance management, development, retention, and succession — with particular focus on building a team that combines deep ITSM expertise with the capability to work alongside and govern AI tooling.

• Build a team structure that supports 24/7 follow-the-sun operations, combining strategically located regional leads with nearshore and offshore delivery models to achieve both service quality and cost efficiency.

• Define and implement a career framework and skills development programme for Service Management professionals — creating clear progression pathways from analyst through to senior leadership, and actively developing the next generation of ITSM leaders through coaching, mentoring, and stretch assignments.

What You Bring

• 15+ years of technology experience, with at least 8+ years in senior service management, ITSM, or IT operations leadership roles.

• Deep expertise in ITIL 4 service management practices — ITIL 4 Managing Professional or Strategic Leader certification strongly desirable — with a track record of implementing and maturing enterprise ITSM at scale.

• Demonstrable experience deploying and governing AI capabilities within enterprise ITSM platforms; familiarity with AIOps principles and observability platforms; and an evidence-based approach to measuring AI’s impact on service quality.

• Demonstrated experience holding cross-company governance authority for Incident Management and Change Management in large, complex, globally distributed organisations.

• Strong command of all core ITIL 4 practices: Incident, Prob