Enterprise Architecture Director- Product (Reconnect Program)

Job id: 34528

Job location: London, GB

Colt is the New Standard in high bandwidth network and voice services for enterprises and wholesale customers in Europe, Asia and North America’s largest business hubs. With a global reach but a deep local presence, Colt is big enough to deliver and small enough to care.

Function: Strategy & Architecture

The closing date for applications is 8th May 2024

The Principal Architect proactively helps guide the enterprise through transformation and optimization initiatives. The Principal Architect’s scope of activities includes:

• Helping the organization grow revenue, optimizing costs and alleviate risks
• Understanding and applying existing, new and emerging technologies to transform and optimize business and operating models
• Help business leaders understand, monetize and operationalize existing, new and emerging technologies
• Understand and respond to disruptive forces by facilitating the decision-making process and providing workable recommendations on initiatives to help the organization drive targeted business outcomes.
• Helping business leaders enable their future-state business capabilities that, in turn, drive the organization’s targeted business outcomes through the choice of initiatives the organization chooses to invest in
• Focussed and aligned to one or more business area(s)
• Manage a team of lead architects and solution architects
• Build and motivate the architecture team — empowering architects — with coaching and mentoring to build a creative and safe learning environment

Key accountabilities:

• Formulate Strategy and Guide Execution
• Understands disruptive forces and the business’s economic & financial levers that affect transformation, to effectively guide technology investment decisions.
• Facilitates business and IT alignment through a collaborative, supportive and consultative manner.
• Formulates, translates, advocates and supports strategy to achieve the organization’s targeted business outcomes.
• Leads the analysis of business and operating models, market trends and the technology industry to find their potential impact on the enterprise’s business strategy, direction and architecture.
• Provides perspective on the readiness of the organization to change and innovate.
• Scans for major disruptive technology and nontechnology trends (trendspotting) that affect business.
• Contextualizes technology trends based on social, economic, political and other nontechnology trends.
• Identifies technology-enabled innovation opportunities that enable business strategy and deliver expected business outcomes.

Plan and Manage the IT Portfolio:

• Works closely with the (PMO) project management office to ensure the execution of plans corresponds with the promised outcomes throughout the project or product lifecycle.
• Presents gap analysis and/or IT investment roadmaps that reflect the status of the existing IT estate, namely, its ability to contribute to future-state business capabilities around technological platforms.
• Leads analysis of the IT environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement.
• Leads the development of an implementation plan for the enterprise architecture based on business requirements and the varying IT strategies for project-driven or product-driven delivery teams.
• Collaborates with infrastructure, security, data and business process teams to ensure consistency with the enterprise architecture, as well as to identify when it is necessary to modify the enterprise architecture.

Orchestrate the Delivery of Business Outcomes:

• Works with business leaders to identify key drivers and targeted business outcomes to derive useful business context.
• Leads analysis of the business’ future-state capabilities and future vs current IT environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement to drive the business forward.
• Ensure the core EA team works closely with extended EA team members across the organization.
• Ensures the role of EA in the project and product governance setting is one of guidance, advice and oversight.
• Oversees the documentation of all architecture design and analysis work.

Develop the EA Practice:

• Creates reference architectures focused on detailed integrations, major systems and dependencies between business and IT.
• Creates architectural designs to guide and contextualize solution development across products, services, projects and systems (including applications, technologies, processes and information).
• Promotes the business value of EA as an enabler of strategy formulation, and as support for technology innovation, which drives the organization’s top and bottom lines.
• Contributes to the maturing of the enterprise architecture practice into a centre of excellence.
• Plans and manages a talent pool of architects to help deliver the goals, objectives and outcomes of the organization.
• Assist in building/maintaining a skills inventory, and manage a plan to close the skills gap for EA team members which identifies trainings/coaching required to help them develop and progress in their careers.
• Participate in industry forums to represent our business and to harness standardisation which will support our business.

Build and Maintain Relationships:

• Provides consultative advice to business leaders and organizational stakeholders with workable recommendations to make investment decisions about the next business and operating model of their organization, using technology to make that change happen.
• Leads and facilitates interaction with business leaders, product managers and product owners in a business-driven conversation over the risks and implications of product decisions.

Values:

• Lives the Colt values and behaviours, provides the required leadership and drives the culture change.

Experience:

• Master’s or bachelor’s degree in business, computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, system analysis or a related field of study, or equivalent experience.
• Ten or more years of business experience in judicious and operations planning and/or business analysis.
• Ten or more years of experience in at least three disciplines, such as business, information, solution or technical architecture, application development, middleware, information analysis, database management or operations in a multitier environment.
• Certifications required – TOGAF, Certified Architect(CA), Zachmann, SAFE agile.

Skills:

• Knowledge of business ecosystems, SaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), SOA, APIs, open data, microservices, event-driven IT and anticipatory analytics.
• Familiarity with information management practices, system development life cycle management, IT services management, agile and lean methodologies, infrastructure and operations, and EA and ITIL frameworks.
• Ability to forge and facilitate relationships.
• Excellent written, verbal, communication and presentation skills with the ability to articulate new ideas and concepts to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Excellent planning and organizational skills.
• Knowledge of all components of holistic enterprise architecture.
• Familiarity with basic graphical modeling approaches, tools and model repositories.
• Knowledge of business models, operating models, financial models, cost-benefit analysis, budgeting and risk management.
• Grasp of different agile methodologies and frameworks, especially those crafted to be scaled at the enterprise level.
• Understanding of existing, new and emerging technologies, and processing environments.
• Organizationally savvy, and understanding of the political climate of the enterprise and how to navigate obstacles and politics.
• Balance the long-term (“big picture”) and short-term implications of singular decisions and organization goals.
• Estimate the financial impact of EA alternatives.
• Rapidly comprehend the functions and capabilities of new technologies.
• Ready to think, behave and act in an innovative consulting manner to drive the organization’s business strategies.
• Understand and speak the language of the business.

Characteristics:

• Trusted and respected as a subject matter expert & thought leader who can influence and persuade business and IT leaders.
• Comfortable, experienced and accomplished at working with business executives, and able to push back in a professional and diplomatic way.
• Highly collaborative and supportive of business and of its ideals and strategies.
• Highly innovative with aptitude for foresight, systems thinking and design thinking.
• Vendor- and technology-neutral — focused in achieving targeted business outcomes rather than promotion of technological preferences.
• Practical in approach to problem solving and decision making.

In addition to offering competitive salaries and incentive plans, a range of benefits and local rewards packages are offered to staff. Colt recognizes the importance of a work-life balance.

Some benefit examples are:

• Flexible working and relaxed dress code
• Two days annually to spend on volunteering opportunities
• Access to a virtual business school for ongoing learning
• Business mentoring

We strongly encourage candidates of all different backgrounds and identities to apply. We are committed to making Colt an inclusive and supportive workplace.

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