Business Architect or Strategic Solutions Architect
Permanent
120k per annum (17% pension, 33 days holidays)
Location: Dublin City Centre (hybrid 50/50)

Key words: Togaf, business analyst, business architect, solutions architect, programme manager, change manager

Business Architect

• Strategically guide the design and realization of business and operating models. 
• Identify and guide people, processes and technology requirements to operationalize the operating models.
• Support organizational change and investments in response to disruptive forces and toward achieving targeted business outcomes.
• Create business architecture deliverables that clarify strategic intentions, identify business outcomes, explore implications, impacts and risks.
• Help strategy and business leaders understand, apply, monetize and operationalize existing, new, and emerging technologies to transform and optimize business and operating models.
• Support the evolution of the Enterprise Architecture teams’ services and help define the strategy for the EA discipline.
• Align business and IT.

Scope of Activities

1. Supports Business Strategy Formulation

• Assesses the disruptive forces impacting the organization and the economic and financial levers that are susceptible within the organization to transformation and optimization.
• Details competitive threats and opportunities from digital enterprises that are generally considered outside the traditional realm of competition.
• Analyzes the organization's strategy and how the organization currently approaches innovation and monetization.
• Facilitates business strategy development, including economic and political analysis, opportunity identification, technology and business cases, and business innovation portfolio development along with operating model development 
• Engages key business stakeholders to identify business and technology innovation opportunities that enable and drive business strategy. Focuses on growing revenue, optimizes costs, and mitigates risks.
• Leverages the best practices of continuous foresight, innovation and futurism to test business models and strategies, and determine how to adjust either or both to become resilient and future-fit.

2. Enables Organizational Change and Investments

• Collaborates with and facilitates enterprise stakeholders involved in strategy formulation and innovation.
• Constructs deliverables that demonstrate how to move the business toward realizing its strategic goals and targeted business outcomes.
• Uses actionable and diagnostic deliverables to help the business and IT leaders make informed investment decisions.
• Assesses near-term and long-term needs, to establish business and IT investment priorities.
• Utilizes a toolbox of business architecture deliverables to help business leaders identify and make business and IT investment decisions. Deliverables include, but are not limited to, business outcome statements, strategy on a page, scenario plans, business capability models, value-streams maps, business process models, ecosystems models, customer and user profiles, journey maps, human-centric design and investment roadmaps 

3. Facilitates Business and Operating Model Design and Innovation

• Works with business and IT executives to help describe and understand their business and operating models by making the business model clear and explicit.
• Helps business stakeholders build effective communication and targeted messaging to support transformation objectives. Builds out the story building blocks by asking and answering key business and operating model questions.
• Ensures the business and operating models fit together by showing the interdependencies between components, and that the business model story makes sense.
• Uses the organization’s existing business and operating model as the starting point for innovation; for example, by using new technologies to enable a business capability.
• Seeks ways to drive adoption of new technology and reuse existing technology for enabling business capabilities, value streams and business processes.
• Researches and provides information on emerging technology trends and disruptions and competitors' practices.

4. Aligns Business and IT

• Helps business leaders, business units and lines of business executives with design thinking, business modeling, ecosystem modeling, innovation management, IT investment analysis, and operating model design.
• Facilitates development of crosslines of business solutions that combine knowledge of business capabilities, value streams and business processes.
• Advises solution architects on solution options, risks, costs versus benefits, and impact on other business capabilities and processes.
• Collaborates with the enterprise program management office on benefits, issues, risks of initiatives and reporting project status.
• Helps develop a governance plan for ensuring that business architecture is a primary input to the development of other EA viewpoints such as solutions, information and technical architecture.
• Collaborates with project and operational delivery teams – in coordination with solution and technical architects – to ensure continuous delivery of business outcomes, as well as to identify when it is necessary to evolve the business architecture.
• Participates in development and application of guiding principles, standards and minimal viable architectures through the EA governance model, which is informed by the business strategy and corporate governance.
• Participates in the EA governance and assurance process to identify business, information, and solution architecture issues at the front end of the project life cycle, and with product managers and product owners at the different stages of the iterative product lifecycle.
• Works with key organizational stakeholders, enterprise and domain architects to define a strategic plan for leveraging business architecture as part of the organization’s overall enterprise architecture.

5. Forges Customer Centricity

• Transforms the organizational approach to innovation by advocating for the creation of cross-functional or fusion teams and using flexible approaches such as design thinking.
• Supports the enterprise architects to drive and guide the innovation process. Ensures the EA team can provide the bridge into the wider organization and its systems and processes to scale an innovation.
• Collaborates with business and IT project and operational teams to remain apprised of project and product status and informs line of business customer management of progress. Conversely, keeps business and IT service managers and product teams aware of key LOB customer issues, identifying and supporting the resolution of potential problems and conflicts.
• Collaborates with product teams to ensure continuous delivery of business value, as well as to leverage shared technologies, tools, value streams and processes that impact speed to value and time to market.
• Develops ecosystem and business capability models, value stream and customer journey maps to guide product teams in developing their minimum marketable and minimum viable products, value propositions and drive business outcomes.
• Constructs business capabilities models, value stream models, business process models, customer journey maps, and other critical and relevant business architecture deliverables to help product managers and product owners make investment and change decisions in the product life cycle.

Credentials and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in business, information systems or related discipline, or equivalent and extensive related project experience; M.B.A. preferred.
• Five or more years of business experience with a direct responsibility for strategy formulation and/or translation, business analysis/analytics, business architecture and/or program management. 
• Three or more years of solution architecture experience covering both business and technology architecture solutions, including IT products, services and capabilities.
• Experience facilitating, leading, or being a part of, multi-disciplined, high-performance fusion teams
• Experience developing and monitoring delivery of efficient and effective solutions to diverse and complex business problems.