Business Architect

Purpose of the Role:

The Business Architect establishes and maintains business architecture principles, standards, methods, models, and services to design business architecture assets, which are used to understand and improve the alignment between business and IT. This includes creating a blueprint of the baseline and target states of the business landscape based on business, people, and technology drivers. A primary component of the role is to support the Business Engagement Manager with the transition plan for moving from the current state to the future state.

Role Requirements:

• Establish a framework for creating architectures based on business requirements, strategic Business Solution goals, and objectives, as well as industry standards.
  • Develop, set, and maintain business architecture methodologies and modeling standards.
  • Define business architecture policies, principles, and reference models to guide business architecture decision-making.
  • Define and implement processes to create and update business architecture
• Monitor, evaluate and improve the performance of the Business Architecture capability and architecture governance framework.
  • Monitor and measure the maturity and effectiveness of the business architecture capability and framework, and identify potential improvement opportunities.
  • Communicate any business architecture framework updates to all relevant stakeholders, and ensure it is used effectively throughout the Business Solutions department, as well as on every program or project.
  • Establish, maintain and improve the business architecture repository.
  • Create and maintain Level 1 and Level 2 business processes for all legal entities across the Group.
• Identify business disconnects and gaps in the business and IT landscape
  • Identify strategic goals and objectives by reviewing the business and IT strategic direction, and monitoring changes in the business and technology landscape.
  • Identify rationalization opportunities in the business architecture landscape
  • Identify gaps in the business architecture landscape to achieve the strategic goals and objectives.
  • Create high-level as-is and to-be architectures of the future business landscape (e.g. capabilities, business services, business process L0 to L2, etc.).
  • Create architecture roadmaps and transition plans to implement.
  • Identify scope and propose initiatives to realise the future Business Solutions landscape in partnership with the Business Engagement Manager and business.
  • Liaise with the IT Enterprise Architect and Solution Architects to deliver on strategic business objectives and goals.
• Manage Business Architecture deliverables
  • Create a central repository for business processes, and review Business/Process Architect and Lead Business Analyst’s Level 3 processes within each domain.
  • Make sure that all Business Analysts and Architects adhere to the business architecture standards and principles.
  • Ensure that Business Architects and Lead Business Analysts are trained, and have the right set of skills to perform their functions.
  • Review Business Analyst Leads’ outputs.
• Delivery and Customer Satisfaction
  • Engage with General Managers, Senior Managers, Managers, Supervisors, and Users to understand their strategies and business goals at a sufficient level to offer advice on the nature of the required information solution.
  • Identify improvements to the customer experience through process, data, people, and systems.
  • Understand customer needs and develop business processes accordingly.
  • Ensure customer needs and requirements are satisfied through appropriate processes/procedures.
  • Adopt a proactive approach to prevent problems from arising in the future.
  • Drive continuous improvement as an important element of service.

Qualifications

Essential:

• Bachelors Degree (3 years) / NQF level 7 in Information systems, IT and Computer Sciences or related.

Experience

Essential:

• Retail business processes
• Strategy frameworks and best practices
• SDLC Processes
• IT industry experience (at least 10 years)
• IT leadership experience (at least 5 years)
• Retail industry experience (at least 10 years)
• Business analyst mentoring experience (at least 5 years)

Desirable:

• COBIT, TOGAF, RUP, ITIL, ISO 27001
• IT investment portfolio management
• Balanced Scorecard methodology
• IT and development governance models implementation
• Data Warehousing
• Business Intelligence Development