The architect will be responsible for the end-to-end technical of design of the sales and service journeys across a diverse set of products including mobile, broadband, gaming, video, content, IOT, mobile money, insurance.
The teams will operate in a squad and deliver capabilities and feature sets using the agile way of work. The architect must provide the necessary leadership to support the development of the technical solutions and must ensure that the solutions meet business needs and align with architectural standards & guidelines.
The architect will produce designs for managing the organization's portfolio of "to be" and "as is" solutions — including systems (applications, processes and information), shared infrastructure services, and shared application service components to enable and drive targeted business outcomes.
Key Performance Areas
Translates Business Strategy into a Solution Architecture
- Understands business drivers and business capabilities (future and current state) and determines corresponding enterprise system designs and change requirements to drive the organization's targeted business outcomes.
- Understands emerging technology trends and disruptions and the practical application of existing, new, and emerging technologies to enable new and evolving business and operating models.
- Translates business and technical requirements into an architectural blueprint to achieve business objectives and documents all solution architecture design and analysis work.
- Analyzes the technology industry, competitors and market trends, and determines their potential impact on the enterprise.
- Provides deliverables like standard definitions, reference models and architecture designs to help the architecture review board (ARB) assess the impact of new and ongoing technology investment on the business and IT estate.
- Acts as a consultant on a broad range of technologies, platforms and vendor offerings to drive targeted business outcomes.
Leads Solutions Analysis and Design
- Leads evaluation, design and analysis for the implementation of a solutions architecture across a group of specific business applications or technologies based on enterprise business strategy, business capabilities, value-streams, business requirements and enterprise standards.
- Creates architectural designs to guide and contextualize solution development across products, services, projects and systems (including applications, technologies, processes and information).
- Creates reference architectures focused on detailed design principles, decision points, detailed APIs, major systems and dependencies between business and IT.
- Manages and develops the architecture for a broader scope of projects or products, working closely with application architects that manage and design architecture for a single project or product or initiative.
- Analyzes the business-IT environment (run, grow and transform the business) to detect critical deficiencies, legacy and technical debt, and recommends solutions for improvement (systems of record, differentiation and innovation).
Orchestrates Solutions Delivery
- Designs and directs the governance activities associated with ensuring solutions architecture assurance and compliance.
- Defines the principles, guidelines, standards and solution patterns to ensure solution decisions are aligned with the enterprise's future-state architecture vision.
- Facilitates the evaluation and selection of software product standards and services, as well as the design of standard and custom software configurations.
- Supports product managers in EOL (end of life) product decisions to maintain, refresh or retire products, services or systems (including applications, technologies, processes and information).
- Develops a roadmap for the evolution of the enterprise application portfolio from future to current state (as defined by the solutions architecture).
- Monitors the current-state solution portfolio to identify deficiencies through aging of the technologies used by the application, or misalignment with business requirements.
- Identifies the organizational impact (for example, on skills, processes, structures or culture) and financial impact of the solutions architecture.
Facilitates and Collaborates to Deliver Business Outcomes
- Works closely with the agile program management office (PMO) and squads to ensure the execution of plans corresponds with what is being promised throughout the project or product lifecycle.
- Works closely with the product owners and product managers to ensure a robust architectural runway that can support future business requirements throughout the product lifecycle.
- Provides consulting support to application architects within agile teams to ensure the project or product is aligned with the overall enterprise architecture.
- Consults with application and infrastructure development projects and products to fit systems or infrastructure to architecture and identify when it is necessary to modify projects to accommodate the solutions architecture.
- Supports a community of practice (CoP), guiding and helping agile teams, product owners, and application architects to align with the overall enterprise architecture governance and assurance.
Key Tasks
- Analyze business requirements/user stories to determine viable options for solution design and ensure implementation addresses key issues, business strategic objectives and end to end solution design.
- Define and communicate business and solution architecture requirements to inform business cases in line with requirements.
- Design technical solutions that support the value chain and align to the overall enterprise architecture.
- Ensure that the business requirements are reflected in the design and that the appropriate business and technical services are reflected in the overall architecture.
- Collaborate with business stakeholders and business analysts to understand and meet business requirements.
- Drive the implementation and governance of standards for the design, implementation and functioning of various solutions across the business.
- Manage the overall design, implementation and functioning of solutions in line with business requirements.
- Effectively prioritise projects and solutions based on the business's strategic priorities and manage stakeholder expectations accordingly.
- Coordinate various teams to ensure holistic and integrated solution design and delivery in line with business requirements.
- Operate across the technical levels within the enterprise architecture as well as the value chain in order to develop holistic and integrate solutions.
- Contribute to the analysis and development through facilitating and engaging in collaborative analysis sessions, ensuring integration through all affected systems.
- Collaborate with various teams to conduct Solution Architect reviews for a broad set of projects in order to meet business requirements.
- Review and provide input into functional and non-functional requirements in line with the overall architecture.
- Provide requirements to Enterprise Architects that drives the strategic direction for business application, information and technology architecture.
- Partner with the relevant Architects for specific sub-domains in support of solution definition and development to ensure the creation of integrated and fit for purpose solutions.
- Maintain and adhere to envisioned architecture standards, solution integrity and best practice solutions.
