Transcend: Director, Business Persona Architecture and Governance in Milton Keynes

At Johnson & Johnson, we believe health is everything. Our strength in healthcare innovation empowers us to build a world where complex diseases are prevented, treated, and cured, where treatments are smarter and less invasive, and solutions are personal. Through our expertise in Innovative Medicine and MedTech, we are uniquely positioned to innovate across the full spectrum of healthcare solutions today to deliver the breakthroughs of tomorrow, and profoundly impact health for humanity.

As guided by Our Credo, Johnson & Johnson is responsible to our employees who work with us throughout the world. We provide an inclusive work environment where each person is considered as an individual. At Johnson & Johnson, we respect the diversity and dignity of our employees and recognize their merit.

About Innovative Medicine: Our expertise in Innovative Medicine is informed and inspired by patients, whose insights fuel our science-based advancements. Visionaries like you work on teams that save lives by developing the medicines of tomorrow. Join us in developing treatments, finding cures, and pioneering the path from lab to life while championing patients every step of the way.

We are searching for the best talent for a Transcend: Director, Business Persona Architecture and Governance! A pre-identified candidate for consideration has been identified. However, all applications will be considered. Remote work options may be considered on a case-by-case basis and if approved by the Company.

Transcend is a global business transformation program that will modernize our foundational transactional processes and harmonize them into one “clean” ERP as a standardized platform for growth and efficiency gains; simplifying the Pharmaceutical ERP landscape from 7 to 1, standardizing processes to have a cost-effective, fit-for-purpose digital backbone that will enable us to support the Pharmaceutical business with agility. Additionally, the program will remediate the end-of-life system exposure that we risk towards the end of this decade.

This is a key leadership role accountable for shaping and delivering business-wide persona strategies that drive organizational transformation and modernization of our global business operations. It requires outstanding business insight, deep technical expertise, and a proven track record of leading sophisticated, change initiatives across multi-year, high-profile programs.

As the architect and owner of the persona framework, you will set a visionary approach—defining and implementing a Persona Clean Core methodology, ensuring end-to-end ownership, and orchestrating cohesive architecture and governance across cross-functional teams. This role will embed agility and continuous improvement into the organization, influencing business leaders and partners, and aligning persona strategies with the IM Transcend program releases, Operate State, and ensuring tight connection to IM Digital Operating Model Principles. Operating at the critical intersection of strategy and execution, you will actively drive appropriate governance practice tied to Personas to accelerate transformation, mitigate risks, and deliver maximum value.

Key Responsibilities:

• Strategic Leadership, Influence, and Governance: Develops and cultivates the strategic persona framework across People, Process, Data and Technology fronts aligned to business priorities, ensuring comprehensive risk mitigation, prioritization, and readiness. Active participation in key forums and program governance boards to ensure adequate assessment and approval of any design and/or features which impact business personas.
• Transformation Execution & Organizational Enablement: Acts as a strategic advisor to business leaders, guiding resistance management, communication, and targeted persona adoption strategies. Champions cross functional engagement User Access Management (UAM), Security, ISRM, RAC, Training and Data to account for E2E views – bringing clarity via comprehensive persona-based analytics and insights to drive decisions and ensure various compliance and GxP requirements. Orchestrates impact assessments that explicitly include retrofit, current and future assessments of ways of working, SOPs, training, communications and downstream provisioning impacts; manage upstream/downstream dependencies across teams. Engages with key business partners at global functional and local site levels as required to drive relevant role mapping execution and persona governance.
• Insights & Analytics: Sets and reports persona key performance indicators to program leadership and other councils and forums. Collaborate closely with peer groups to bring cohesive view and transparency on end to end insights for complete persona governance.
• Continuous Improvement and Compliance: Implements regular maturity assessments and audits to continuously improve persona governance effectiveness and compliance standard. Completes management and implementation of retrospective persona cleanup and technical debt rehabilitation from prior releases.

Qualifications:

Education: Minimum of High School or equivalent diploma/degree is required. Bachelor’s / University or higher degree is strongly preferred, with a focused degree in Supply Chain, Business, Technology, Engineering, or other related field.

Experience and Skills:

• Required: 8+ years of in-depth, leadership experience delivering change management principles, persona / role based methodologies, and strong technical prowess. Deep expertise in end-to-end supply chain operations, with a strategic understanding of cross-functional dependencies and customer engagement points. Comprehensive expertise in crafting and implementing coordinated business architecture, advanced persona and identity management, and orchestrating seamless data flows for robust persona mapping and transformative change adoption. Experience using methodologies such as user persona development, journey mapping, impact assessment, and mitigation and realization strategies. Distinguished customer management and persuasive influencing abilities, with extensive experience facilitating governance and chairing senior leadership forums across diverse global and regional functions; able to influence, engage, and align partners and executives across all organizational levels. Demonstrated leadership in orchestrating large-scale transformation, driving critical shifts in operational models at both enterprise and local levels, while maintaining meticulous alignment with regulatory frameworks in highly complex, regulated industries. Resilient and tenacious with outstanding analytical and problem-solving competence. Consistently identifying strategic risks and architecting resilient mitigation frameworks for complex, high-stakes business challenges.
• Preferred: Extensive experience directing technical debt remediation and governance initiatives, while ensuring portfolio remains scalable, compliant, and strategically aligned with business vision. Recognized authority in change, process, and persona impact analysis, with a consistent record of anticipating and leading downstream and upstream implications across design, SOP, training, change management, and operational execution. Deep experience navigating regulated environments (pharmaceutical/biotech), with a strong grasp of compliance-driven access requirements and enterprise risk management.

Other: This position requires up to 40% domestic and international travel.

Required Skills:

Preferred Skills: Alliance Formation, Business Alignment, Business Model Innovation, Change Management, Communications Measurement, Impact Reporting, Inclusive Leadership, Industry Analysis, Leadership, Operations Management, Organizational Change Management, Stakeholder Engagement, Strategic Change, Strategic Thinking, Training People.

Summary: Location: High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom; Belfast, Antrim, Ireland. Type: Full time.