Lead Business Architect - Sandton at Sanlam Group

What will you do?

• To Align business architecture with business strategy and provide systems delivery teams with business direction. Responsible for reviewing the complex high-level architecture of all of the processes in the organisation and defines and implements a business process architecture that links the organisation's business processes to the value chains and ultimately to the strategic goals of the organisation ensuring minimisation of business process flows and maximisation of the investment in information technology.
• Models business processes and creates an environment that facilitates business process improvement on an ongoing basis.
• In heading up Business Architecture there is a constant assessment of the complexity and depth of the change initiatives, the numbers of impacted individuals, the number of cross functional and cross business unit impacts, and engages with stakeholders at executive, senior management and all other levels to ensure a single understanding of the vision, the change journey, the project benefits realisation and the engagement of all key stakeholders.
• The work of the Head of Business Architecture stretches across all of Santam Client Solutions business lines and units and is proactive in guiding and facilitating critical leadership alignment, decision making around business priorities, ways of working, operational redesign to unlock the benefits.

What will make you successful in this role?

• Understands multiple components that make up the business and is able to research and build entire business needs from the ground up considering all elements. Ability to translate these to System projects and system / manual improvements.
• Provide strategic advisory to leadership, business owners, and other relevant stakeholders, on specialist feasibility analysis, evaluations and business projects. Conducts special studies and prepares recommendations for policy, procedure, control or action. Analyses information to determine present and future performance. 
• Makes recommendations regarding opportunities, progress and improvement strategies
• Lead in project/product development post product sign off.
• Ensuring that new product or project meets the business needs within the construct of the organizational structure.
• Ensuring that business process, rules and system support are aligned and understood.
• Provides governance functions, frameworks, tools and an enterprise-wide change impact analysis and readiness for each initiative in the organization, this is across large scale initiatives (e.g. SBI) and operational changes (Sales Portal and Digital Enhancements).
• Ensuring consistent process documentation across all business units to ensure these are up to IQS standards and requirements. 
• Providing steer and structure to Business Analysts within the business units

Qualification and Experience

• Tertiary degree and/or qualification in a related discipline such as Business Analyst Diploma / Degree or a relevant business qualification. 
• Proven track record for having worked effectively with large scale programmes and projects in organisations (5 or more years) 
• Experience in working with systems thinking and be acutely aware of all interactions in a system 
• Experience of working in an organisation going through fast paced, transformational change 
• Experience in facilitating multi-disciplinary teams in complex environments and designing learning interventions 
• Experience in Short term insurance industry > 5 years 
• 5 years - Business Analyst Experience 
• Full understanding of SDLC and agile methodology 
• 8 years’ senior leadership experience

Skills and Competencies

• Manage a team of BI Developers and Data Analysts to produce BI dashboards to provide analysis and insights to stakeholders
• Engage with stakeholders both internal and external to manage implementation in client data onboarding and data transfer mechanisms
• Investigate and assess the use of new technologies within data management and analytics environment
• Experience in short term environment (advantageous)
• Drive modernisation through data migration projects from traditional MI into cloud 
• Manex management
• Develop and mentor team members and drive continuous skillset development
• Experience of Telephony systems, SQL, CRM, POM, Qlikview & MS Office Suite such as Excel