Specialist - Customer Value Management Solution Architect at MTN

Key Performance Areas:

Strategic Input

• Assist in developing goals, strategies, and plans needed to achieve the portfolios vision and build the capabilities to enable optimal delivery with input from relevant stakeholders.
• Support the strategic analysis of MTN system strategies to ensure that the strategic technological direction aligns and supports MTN Group objectives.
• Assist with  developing the CVM Technology roadmap in accordance to MTN’s broader strategic Ambitions.
• Ensure the enablement of a self-service and automation philosophy
• Assist in aligning planning against the strategic intent of the company with agreed business outcomes within the portfolio, adhering to MTN’s IT Architecture Enterprise principles, key approved decisions and enterprise wide programs.
• Assist in developing and implementation of a vendor sourcing strategy to manage technical delivery of requirements into the production environments as well as support and maintenance for the production environments.
• Assist to implement the  strategy to adopt key new technologies to enable best in class real time contextual marketing.

Customer

• Understand Business needs and develop/fine-tune systems accordingly
• Educate business on CVM capabilities that is available for commercialisation 
• Give input to the relevant business units into the key drivers for budget and forecast purposes
• Ensure that CVM Technology engages with business stakeholders on a regular basis on underutilized capabilities of systems, reports and future CVM ecosystem.

Governance

• Follow all MTN’s Enterprise governance procedures.
• Ensure that changes to the current environment are properly documented and tested before promoting into production.  Post production changes should be documented and managed.
• Support the prioritisation process to drive prioritisation of requirements and initiatives in functional areas to ensure timeous delivery.
• Support Revenue Assurance functions to understand and resolve any revenue issues or leakage.
• Create visibility of changes to core systems, data and products by informing the organisation of changes.
• Support assessment of Portfolio maturity on an annual basis.
• Influence and implement MTN’s security policies.
• Support the creation of critical Policies, Processes or Procedure such that Business risk is managed in accordance to MTN’s policy standards.

Tactical Planning and Operations 

• Provide system consultation for all CVM applications related projects aligned to MTN’s enterprise architecture principles.
• Design and deliver IS solutions that meet business and IT functional and non functional requirements. 
• Ensure the existence of test environments to assist with requirements definitions.
• Ensure delivery of (authorised) projects according to the PMO prioritisation.
• Ensure that one performs the necessary analysis, design, modelling and documentation tasks necessary to pass MTN IS governance forums.
• Ensure that vendors (whether they do development or system configuration) adhere to the change management policies and MTN’s governance polices, following industry standards, proper documentation to ensure MTN maintains its IP. 
• Ensure that adherence to MTN’s architectural standards, system performance metrics and measures.
• Engage with other MTN cross organisational teams to extract potential benefits and efficiencies achieved at a technical implementation and/or process layer.
• Assist in the evaluation of new technologies and products to determine feasibility.
• Continuously review, improve and integrate processes, in order to optimize outputs and overcome fragmentation.
• Participate in the design and implementation of an enterprise architecture based on business requirements and information technology strategies and trends.

Internal Processes

• Ensure up to date Policies, Processes or Procedures are in place to manage IT risk and manage the relevant ISO certifications through compliance.
• Provide overall direction of architecture for integrations between applications and platforms.
• Ensure Delivery of CVM Transfomration Project and  Business as Usual Projects through continual identification of:
• Architectural artifacts aligned to MTN Enterprise SOA Architecture, SOA Governance and/ or API management
• Oversee Aspects of a system that have not been performing optimally that require changes to architecture
• Any PoC required to demonstrate some item of functionality to Business
• Documenr CVM BAU architecture artefacts that are aligned to MTN architectural standards
• Document CVM Strategic project architectural artefacts 
• Conduct internal and external architecture reviews with the broader IT and Architecture functions 

Financial

• Assist in tracking the budget for CVM Technology
• Provide input to Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) Plans for CVM Technology 
• Provide input to compile and manage CAPEX budget and assist OPEX related budgets relating to functional activities
• Assist in the forecasting, planning and development of the portfolio’s budget and business plans for IS
• Give input into budgets that will enable delivery of area of expertise to the relevant business unit.
• Support CAPEX submissions to ensure that funds are secured.
• Support the creation of the business case for initiatives and projects in functional areas
• Assist  in tracking  infrastructure budgets related to the support of business area platforms, processes and initiatives 
• Assist in ensuring contract information is updated centrally and drive with the IS Commercial team
• Adhere to a non-inflationary or escalating contract pricing mod

Core planning functions

• Develop and implement solutions to provide detailed design of systems, focusing on applications and services architecture
• Identify and document impacted systems based on business requirements as documented in the Requirement Design Specification (RDS)
• Assist CVM project teams to define, plan, architect and implement requirements with vendors and Operational areas
• Ensure that Living System Logical Architecture Documentation is updated with each project, showing functional architecture, use cases, functional logic and that quality is determined by whether an alternative vendor could use it to reproduce a systems functioning with at least 95% level of accuracy.
• Ensure that Living System Snapshot, Roadmap and Project Architectural History Documentation is updated quarterly

Document High Level Design specifying:

• An understanding of the impacted systems 
• Architecture design in accordance to MTN governance policy
• Understand the business and product objectives of the project
• Provide an understanding of the environmental and business constraints in achieving a solution to the requirements
• Review of functional Requirements Specification for each impact system of the project
• Encourage and provide an environment for Innovation and Proof of Concept work where system functionality can be demonstrated to business. This should be done using the multi-skilling of team members where one often needs to write scripts and/or small ad-hoc applications in order to perform such a demonstrations quickly and therefore at the lowest cost
• Ensure that the team always have System Reporting and E2E testing strategy in place and the team should adhere to it.
• In all matters and decisions seek consensus with, and contributions from, as wide a group of stakeholders as possible

QUALIFICATIONS

Job Requirements  Education:

• University Degree in Information Systems or Engineering (BSc IT, Bcom IT) or Computer Science Degree
• TOGAF or similar accreditation

Experience:

• At least 5 years experience in the IT/Telecoms industry and specifically the application of Information Technology within the telco space should be applicable experience as a Solution Architect at an internationally recognised operator. 
• Experience in designing solutions for inbound, outbound and real time contextual campaigns in the Telco environment
• Minimum of 5 Years of experience on Campaign Management Systems, Loyalty Management, Integration, Architecture and Data related projects.
• Minimum of 5 years experience in CVM (Customer Value Management) Technology enablement
• Good understanding of design patterns and SOA reference architectures
• Demonstrates thorough understanding of SOA Architecture, SOA Governance and/ or API management.
• Familiarity with systems integrations such as CRM, Content Management, POS/Commerce, or Web Analytics, USSD, SMSC, APP is preferred
• Familiarity with data architecture/schema, including relational data models and sql syntax, documentation of data models, and data flows.
• Project management and business optimisation experience would be advantageous; including working in “Agile” and “Waterfall” teams.
• Exposure to managing external vendor/supplier relationships and service level agreements.
• Experience in the process of reviewing and aqcuiring Technology platforms through POC, RFI, RFP and vendor selection.
• Demonstrate the ability to effectively establish and maintain strategic working relationship with peers and constitutes at all levels of the organization.
• Background in programming (e.g. Node, React, Angular, Java, Python, C/C++, C#, VB.Net, Erlang etc) is preferred
• Cloud implementation of CVM and Loyalty