About our client
Our client is a global Turnkey Digital Engineering & Cloud Transformation specialist delivering innovative solutions and business outcomes for its clients for over 40 years. With over 5000 employees across 40+ countries, they empower businesses across industries such as Healthcare & Life Sciences, Retail, Manufacturing, Financial Services, and Government/Public sectors to enable customer success and digitization programs.
They partner with enterprises to unlock their power of data, modernise applications to the cloud, and accelerate digital advantage for all stakeholders. Our client’s mission is to Decomplex Digital with Trust, Value and Velocity and make their clients’ business future-ready with an industry-first approach.
Position overview
The Head of Architecture will be the figure head and responsible owner for the architecture as a service function and will provide leadership and ownership of activities relating to this. They will have responsibility for management and leadership of the UK Service Line practitioners. They will provide customer facing architectural consultancy as well as internal technical leadership across the service lines.
Core responsibilities
The Head of Architecture will be accountable for a broad range of activities. He/she will need to build up strong relationship with a range of stakeholders, as well as leading the overall AaaS service / UK SLP. Specifically this will include:
- Management of the Architecture consulting function.
- Ensuring that appropriate tools and methods are available, understood and employed across the architecture team
- External and internal communications
- Branding and marketing
- Commercial management
- Recruitment
- Team development
- Transition into operational ways of working
- Understanding, explaining and presenting strategic and / or transformational subjects at senior levels of the customer organisation in a persuasive, convincing and collaborative manner.
- Pastoral leadership of the Architecture team
- Ensure Architecture team skills and capabilities remain aligned to business strategy and industry trends
- Identify, articulate and cascade strategic business objectives, business needs and the business benefits of IT solutions to a wide variety of levels of audience from junior to senior in both technical and business roles.
- Lead the development of the architecture community within the UK. E.g. Company events, industry events, mentoring, training.
- Work in multiple supplier environment and engage and maintain relationships at peer levels across the customer, suppliers and partner supply chains.
- Analyse and explain the strategic and business risks involved in adopting certain solutions and be a key contributor to customer risk management process.
- To provide strategic consultancy to bid teams and delivery functions for general high profile opportunities.
- Participate in technical and project governance reviews.
- Supporting the project teams and customers in resolution of issues.
Key interfaces
Critical to this role will be the building and maintaining of strong senior relationships. This will be achieved by demonstrating humility, technical competence, thought leadership and empathy for the customer’s complex challenges. Specific stakeholder relationships will need to be forged with the following groups:
- Customers: Supporting architecture consultants in their engagements with senior Architectural community, CROs, CIOs. Understanding and supporting the development of IT strategy, architectural approaches and standards, and identifying opportunities for the provision of additional services.
- Other Enabling consulting Heads. Finding areas of cross over and sharing best practice and business improvement. Ensuring that customer engagement is organised.
- Account Director/Portfolio Manager: Ensuring that Architects are providing value to the delivery teams and providing escalation point where required.
- CTIO Office: ensure correlation between the internal architectural capabilities and the technology roadmaps that are proposed by the CTIO
- Service Lines – Delivering SL targets for UK and being the link from UK Sales to SL’s and vice versa
Requirements
Qualifications:
- Educated to degree level or equivalent experience or appropriate industry experience, and have demonstrable experience in leading technology teams
Knowledge and Experience:
- Demonstrable experience in leading an enterprise level transformation in a large and complex multi-supplier / multi-platform secure environment.
- Experience of engagement with customers at all levels of organisation hierarchy;
- Experience in Leadership and management of technology teams
- Experience of Infrastructure, Application, Data and Integration approaches.
- Evidence of creating strategy and architecture road maps.
- Knowledge of new technologies and architectural approaches – providing a route through new technology jargon – understanding of market direction and horizon scanning.
- Knowledge and experience of software architectures and software integration architectures;
- Knowledge and awareness of standard Project management approaches
- Core understanding of cloud technologies – AWS / Azure / Google cloud services
- Knowledge of modern development frameworks and database technologies.
- Experience of working with organisations that have an multi country business model
