Head of Architecture

Envision Employment Solutions is currently looking to hire a Head of Architecture & Service Planning for one of our partners, a multinational financial services company.

**Summary**:
The Head of Architecture & Service PlanningAchieves BDC goals by defining, integrating, and upgrading a comprehensive information system architecture, managing staff.

**Responsibilities**:

- Drive coherence, improvement and simplification of the underlying architecture and capabilities.
- Synthesize the long term and short-term vision and articulate enterprise architecture blueprint of the targeted vision in line with the budget and planned roadmap of IT technologies.
- Design the specifications, models and guidelines within a coherent architectural blueprint to meet user requirements reflecting the established design principles.
- Ensures compliance between business strategies, enterprise transformation activities and technology directions, setting strategies, policies, standards and practices.
- Develop long term planning forecasts for all services and manage preparation of IT Architecture planning guidelines and recommendations for AS-IS and TO-BE
- Direct the governance of IT Business, Application, Data and Technology Architecture and ensure end-to-end IT Applications demarcation, performance & SLAs.
- Lead the review of proposed solution architecture, both service based and custom development, for technical compliance.
- Ensure an overall architecture with consistent uses of data and significant reuse of technology and business services throughout the bank.
- Drive integration across all aspects of enterprise architecture and ensuring an end-to-end enterprise focus.
- Drive the improvement and simplification of the underlying architectures and capabilities.
- Plan and coordinate activities to ensure compliance with regulations, standards and requirements.
- Scout the market for latest IT technology trends and innovative solution.
- Communicate with technology providers and vendors for products roadmaps and new features.
- Collaborate with other teams and communicate clearly and concisely, especially when dealing with technical topics.
- Accomplishes Enterprise Architecture human resource objectives by recruiting, selecting, orienting, training, assigning, scheduling, coaching, counseling, and disciplining employees; communicating job expectations; planning, monitoring, appraising, and reviewing job contributions; planning and reviewing compensation actions; enforcing policies and procedures.

**Requirements**:

- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering or Communication Engineering or equivalent.
- Minimum of 15 years’ experience in IT Architecture, Design & Service Planning, including 5 years as a Technology Leadership position.
- Significant experience in shaping and delivering architectural content for technology-enabled transformation programs
- Strong understanding of emerging and innovative technologies, and how to leverage them for business advantage
- Experience in assessing an organization’s IT landscape and developing technology investment cases and roadmaps that align with business goals
- Experience in defining and implementing an organization’s Enterprise Architecture function, setting up Architecture Governance & advising on best practices
- Comprehensive knowledge of one or more Enterprise Architecture domains such as Application, Data, Infrastructure, Integration Architecture
- Certifications and/or experience of Enterprise Architecture frameworks
- Knowledge of business ecosystems, software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), service-oriented architecture (SOA), APIs, open data, microservices, event-driven IT and predictive analytics.
- Strong knowledge of Big Data Analytics, Data Warehousing, Data Lake, Machine Learning, Complex Event Processing, Parallel Processing, Low Latency Architectures, and Enterprise Application Integration.
- Be a business-focused, creative, innovative, pragmatic, and positive team player
- Understanding of architecture governance, of security management, design authority processes and overall solution design management processes
- Understanding of the different types of agile principles, methodologies and frameworks
- Strategic capability planning
- Understanding of “Value Management” (what is the value and how is it measured)
- Strong leadership skills with exceptional soft and interpersonal skills, including teamwork, facilitation and negotiation.
- Strong consulting skills such as targeted communications, engagement management, stakeholder management and business development..
- Familiarity with basic graphical modelling approaches, tools and model repositories (e.g., ArchiMate).
- Demonstratable experience in EA practice set-up (incl., EA charter, operating model, capability framework, architecture principles, technical design authority, performance management, maturity model assessment).

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