Background
Proact is Europe’s leading specialist in data and information management with focus on cloud services and data center solutions. We help our customers to store, connect, protect, secure and drive value through their data whilst increasing agility, productivity and efficiency. We’ve completed thousands of successful projects around the world, have more than 4,000 customers and currently manage hundreds of petabytes of information in the cloud. We employ over 1,200 people in 13 countries across Europe and North America.
Proact’s cloud services business is strategically important and is growing rapidly. Cloud services is not only important to provide relevant and competitive solutions to our customers, but also to reach our long-term business goals of growth and increased profitability.
A key success factor and enabler of the cloud business is Proact’s ability to deliver our services with high degree of efficiency, speed and quality across all our 13 markets. A strategic initiative is ongoing to digitally transform the service delivery of our cloud services with the objectives to standardize our services and delivery across Proact’s four delivery hubs, to further automate processes and to continuously improve ways-of-working. There is a need to increase the speed of the transformation to stay relevant in the marketplace, including our proposition in the Public Cloud, and to achieve our long-term financial goals.
The purpose of the Senior Enterprise Architect is to lead and drive the enterprise architecture, establishing a target architecture that supports our business model, is sustainable and scalable as we grow our business. As one of the key functions within our service operations team you will be expected to lead the strategy and design of the technology future state aligning with the business strategy and direction.
Service Operations
Proact is conducting business in 13 countries that are organized in four business units: Nordics & Baltics, UK, West, Central. Each business unit has a services delivery hub which are providing Cloud and Support services to the local countries within or across the business units.
The Service Operations teams consists of approximately 500 employees across technical and operational roles. The teams are organized with direct-reporting lines into the respective business unit, with a second dotted-line reporting in a matrix into the global Service Operations function. Additionally, the global Service Operations function includes the CISO, CIO, Operational Excellence and Process & Tools teams. Hence, the day-to-day operations lie within the accountability of the local business units, the long-term transformation and strategic change agenda lies within central Service Operations functions. A close collaboration between the local and the central functions are crucial to successful operations and successful transformation.
A Service Operations Transformation program is ongoing. The program’s overarching objective is to improve efficiency in service delivery and speed up time-to-market while maintaining the already good service quality. The program is focusing on the following three areas: standardization of processes and platforms, automation & orchestration, and data-driven operations. All focus areas require a high degree of digitalization as well as change-management. As part of the Service Operations leadership team, you will report directly to the VP Service Operations.
Responsibility
The Enterprise Architect is responsible for globally documenting the Proact Enterprise Architecture Landscape, designing the Target Architecture Landscape, and creating the Migration Plan including the identification and design of relevant transition architectures. The Enterprise Architect is also responsible for ensuring the completeness (fit-for-purpose) of the architecture, in terms of adequately addressing all the pertinent concerns of its stakeholders. He/she is responsible for the integrity of the architecture, in terms of connecting all the various views to each other, satisfactorily reconciling the conflicting concerns of different stakeholders, and showing the trade-offs made in doing so. The Senior Enterprise Architect is also responsible for identifying resource needs such as solution/system/technical architects to assist in the design and creation of the detailed target architecture. The Enterprise Architect is ultimately responsible for the design of the company landscape ensuring that it is flexible, adaptable, current, and business relative.
Profile
Both soft and hard skills are required to be successful as the Enterprise Architect for Proact. The role requires both strong communication skills as well as analytical skills to ensure that businesses have the right tools for success. Skills include:
- Problem-solving: Ability to define which issues need to be addressed, and the variables that may affect their resolution. The ability to come up with solutions that effectively address business and IT issues through technical analysis, troubleshooting, research, evaluation, and communication.
- Consensus building: Discussing with stakeholders and getting agreement on the problem and solution. This requires both strong verbal and written communication skills to settle conflicts.
- Solution realization: Turning solution proposals into reality throughout the process of development, testing, and deployment.
- Solution management: Ability to manage the solution through its lifecycle.
- Leadership: Strong leadership skills are needed to empower employees and IT teams to remain on task and meet deadlines.
- Knowledge: Fluency to develop and use solution architecture frameworks, patterns, and best practices to drive business transformation.
Your tasks and responsibilities
- Ensure IT delivering business value and driving business outcomes
- Document the Enterprise architecture models to reflect the current architecture landscape
- Permanently analyze and design the target architecture landscape in respect to business applications landscape and technology landscape by considering Proact Group´s business goals, strategy, business processes and overall vision/mission statement.
- Work in a Matrix Organization with Business Owners, Application Owners, Technology Owners, and Domain and communicate effectively in obtaining and synthesizing requirements.
- Facilitate business conversations and moderate the definition of design principles to govern the incoming demands
- Assess demands from different stakeholders on architectural fit and define a solution that meets both the current needs and also is scalable to future business needs.
- Evaluate and link business strategic, tactical, and operational demand with IT capacity.
- Evaluate internal functions, business development strategies, and IT processes and suggest improvements or changes that optimize our business as a group.
- Collaborate with a diverse workforce within a matrix environment and communicate effectively in obtaining and synthesizing requirements.
- Work with the application, technology, product, and domain owners to ensure that roadmaps are present & maintained for their respective entries in the Enterprise Architecture Repository
- Provide leadership, coaching and mentorship to the architecture community and stakeholders. Identify gaps and resource needs within the architecture environment, using an internal first approach.
- Apply agile processes to the architecture build, ensuring that Proact can easily adapt its environment to changes in customer behaviour.
Qualifications
- A minimum of 10 years of analysis experience is expected.
- Experience and knowledge in at least one aspect of the business related to customer solutions.
- A good understanding of service operations and delivery models from a business and technology perspective.
- Strong Cloud solutions knowledge and expertise with a minimum of 5 years focus on industry solutions.
- A bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field.
- The relevant certificates to display competency in the standards related to the industry.
- Can display examples of enterprise transitions with blueprint target architecture in complex international environments.
- Extensive quantifiable experience with business, system and delivery processes including data modelling and cloud architecture is a requirement.
- Fluent in English.
