Lead IT Architect

Company Description

Responsibilities (key activities and decisions for which role is responsible)

• Stakeholder Engagement: Build and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders, including business leaders, IT teams, and systems owners, with the goal of identifying and prioritizing business goals. See the Network section for additional details about the set of stakeholders to engage with.
• Establish and Govern BPM Framework: define the BPM methodology, standards, tools, and governance processes to ensure repeatable, scalable process improvement and avoid ad-hoc, siloed efforts.
• Business Process Analysis and Modeling: Lead workshops with business stakeholders to capture current "as-is" processes, identify pain points, and design optimized "to-be" processes. Use modeling tools to document and simulate processes.
• Enterprise Architecture Modeling: Develop and maintain enterprise architecture models across various domains (business, application, data, technology) to provide a comprehensive view of the enterprise, showing relationships between different components and supporting impact analysis.
• Establish and Govern EA Framework: Define the EA framework, including principles, reference architectures, metamodels, and governance to provide a holistic view of the enterprise. Manage technical debt and optimize the sequencing of upgrade and migration activities to enable informed decisions about technology investments and ensure alignment with business strategy.
• Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture: Define and promote best practices for BPM and EA modelling, including leading workshops and training sessions to educate architects and system owners on these best practices.
• Gap Analysis and Road mapping: Identify gaps between current state and desired future state for both processes and architecture. Develop roadmaps for implementing changes, prioritizing initiatives, and aligning with business strategy.
• Tool Selection and Implementation: Evaluate and recommend BPM and EA tools. Oversee their implementation and ensure they are effectively used across the organization by defining and delivering evangelism and enablement programs.
• Continuous Improvement: Monitor the effectiveness of BPM and EA initiatives and identify areas for improvement. Stay up-to-date with industry best practices.
• Support Integration with Existing Systems: Support Integration specialists as they ensure seamless integration of optimized processes with existing ERP, CRM, and HR systems.
• Operating Model for BPM and EA frameworks: Create and implement a comprehensive operating model, defining roles, responsibilities, processes, and metrics to ensure effective frameworks that align with the strategy.
• Stakeholder Management: employ techniques to ensure stakeholders’ needs and expectations are understood and managed; potential conflicts or issues are identified and addressed early on; and build trust and foster collaboration for mutually beneficial outcomes.
• Prioritization: evaluate the relative value of BPM and EA initiatives by evaluating against a set of developed criteria; and ensuring that potential conflicts in priorities with stakeholder groups are discussed, evaluated and agreed collaboratively.
  

Qualifications

• Experience (preferred or required technical, functional and/or leadership experience)
• Strategic Leadership and Team Coaching:
• Demonstrated excellence in communication, collaboration, and advanced leadership skills, with a proven track record of inspiring and coaching high-performing enterprise architecture teams.
• Expertise in working effectively with cross-functional teams and influencing senior stakeholders to drive strategic initiatives and architectural vision.
• Proven Experience and Expertise:
• Over 15 years of comprehensive experience in ERP, CRM, and HR systems, with an emphasis on financial systems and processes.
• Hands-on experience with complex and large-scale SAP project implementations, including end-to-end implementation, rollouts, and upgrades.
• Minimum of 5 years in a senior leadership role, successfully managing and mentoring enterprise architecture teams to foster innovation, resilience, and professional growth.
• Thought Leadership and Vision:
• Functional and technical strategic thought leadership, capable of providing both deep and broad perspectives on the SAP portfolio and related ecosystems.
• Expert knowledge in designing, developing, consulting, leading, and managing comprehensive SAP and ecosystem initiatives is a desirable good to have.
• Global and Regulatory Expertise:
• In-depth understanding of required SAP localizations for geographies with business operations (North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia) is a desirable good to have.
• Extensive experience with SAP S/4HANA migration and optimization projects is a desirable good to have.
• Project and Change Management:
• Strong project management skills with a history of leading complex transformation projects from inception to successful completion.
• Proficient in change management and user training for systems implementations, ensuring smooth transitions and adoption.
• Stakeholder and Vendor Management:
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to bridge the gap between business objectives and IT solutions.
• Experience in working with global teams and managing diverse stakeholder groups.
• Skilled in evaluating and managing relationships with technology vendors, including expertise in understanding contractual terms, service-level agreements (SLAs), and negotiation.
• Additional Assets:
• Experience in a regulated industry is highly desirable.
• High levels of energy, conscientiousness, rapport building, resiliency, inventiveness, and curiosity to drive continuous improvement and innovation within the team and across projects.
  

Additional Information