Senior Manager: Business Architecture and Analysis

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together…one story at a time.

Job Summary

A Senior Business Architect is a strategic, senior-level role responsible for leading PPB COO business transformation initiatives and ensuring the delivery of critical architectural assets such as business capability models, business capabilities, and value streams.

This role involves taking a leadership position in the design and development of holistic, multidimensional business architecture frameworks that align with organizational goals. The Business Architect plays a key role in bridging strategy and execution, enabling the organization to deliver integrated, scalable, and sustainable solutions.

Job Description

The main focus of the role is to:

· Leverage deep and broad architecture expertise, the ‘leading’ industry practices and PPB strategy to shape the strategic business architecture for the cluster.

· Connect the strategic direction of the cluster and its operating model to business process, systems, data and people to enable the delivery of current and future strategic programmes that will bring sustainable business value.

· Integrate projects and programme strategies, capability requirements and roadmaps across the cluster, ensuring alignment to business strategies, drivers and financial priorities for the cluster and its individual businesses.

· Collaborate with Technology and Solutions Architects to align technical solutions with business needs, ensuring the data shared across the businesses is well-defined (including interrelation) and properly orchestrated.

· Provide strong leadership of the design and delivery of solutions across multiple business initiatives and programmes to achieve a positive impact on colleague and customer experience/value and business performance.

Key accountabilities Accountability:

Strategy contribution and translation

· Contribute to PPB strategy and assume the ‘one stop shop’ accountability for the Business Architecture designs and capabilities roadmap that enables the achievement of the strategic objectives, improve colleague and customer experience and ultimately optimise business performance across cluster businesses

Act as a liaison for the cluster into Technology, relevant Vendors and Group Architecture Governance Structures in order to gain a broad understanding of industry trends and innovations, opportunities and impact for the cluster businesses.

· Develop an integrated business architecture strategy (Target Business Architecture) based on a situational awareness of various business scenarios and motivations, applying a structured business architecture approach and methodology for capturing the key views of the cluster.

· Lead the effort to work with business leaders within the cluster to identify business capability needs and prioritization and translate to strategic initiatives and prioritization into business architecture deliverables and roadmaps, as well as driving interlocks on the delivery timelines.

Accountability: Business Architecture, Capability Modelling and Business Requirements

· Understand the existing architectural landscape and associated business and technology solutions and the degree of alignment with the PPB COO strategy.

· Lead the evolution and transformation of the overall cluster business architecture (across business and technical domains), ensuring creation of business architecture models that demonstrate how products, operations and system interoperate within the businesses and across the business value chain.

· Partner and work collaboratively across multiple business units and functions to ensure that their architectures (current and future) are coherent, stable, scalable, modular and fit for purpose while delivering optimal customer and colleague experiences.

· Contributes to, co-evolves and co-curates Absa’s architecture standards, principles and practices, ensuring that business solutions and roadmaps developed across the cluster are aligned to these, and that the cluster leverages common solutions and services to achieve its objectives.

Accountability: People Leadership and Stakeholder Management

· Provide leadership and direction to the Business Architecture teams and other areas of the businesses within the cluster, ensuring that business designs, business change and improvements are aligned to the cluster and enterprise visions and that the best possible outcomes are achieved for the cluster, its businesses, colleagues and customers in the short and long term.

· Establish and embed the PPB Business Architecture and Analysts Centre of Excellence (CoE) ensuring that shared knowledge, practices and capabilities are leveraged to benefit the cluster and the growth of its people.

· Act as a subject matter expert for the development of business architecture framework, tool suite selection and design and methodology development.

· Develop, evolve and maintain the cluster’s target operating model, providing guidance to cluster leadership to ensure the cluster has the right target capabilities to deliver its short term and future vision.

· Participate in Architecture governance to ensure that Business Architecture plans are in line with business strategy and adheres to Group Architecture design policies and standards.

· Actively contribute to the wider Architecture community in the development of the enterprise architecture

Accountability: Execution

· Provide architectural oversight for cluster projects and programmes, ensuring requirements are in alignment with business strategies and business architecture roadmap/framework. This includes understanding and integrating relevant group initiatives into PPB, in relation to business architectures and solutions designed, while applying the “check and challenge” lenses to ensure robustness of solutions and positive impact to the cluster (value creation).

· Influence, collaborate and guide delivery teams to independently analyze customer/business requirements & varying business capabilities; and leverage the analysis outcome to identify and accurately frame ‘the complex business problems to solve’ as part of all critical strategic initiatives and programmes

Capability Building & Knowledge Sharing

· Participate in peer reviews and knowledge transfer across delivery teams.

· Set and cascade solution direction across teams.

· Coach and mentor delivery teams to build architectural capability.

· Contribute to the architecture body of knowledge and evolution of architectural principles.

Education & Experience

Education:

· Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, IT Management, or Engineering.

Experience:

· Minimum 6 years in Business Architecture or related roles.

· Proficient in modeling business processes using tools and techniques (e.g., UML).

Experience with enterprise architecture modeling tools.

· Ability to identify structural issues, functional interdependencies, and cross-silo redundancies.

· Skilled in applying architectural principles to business solutions.

Education

Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Physical, Mathematical, Computer and Life Sciences (Required)

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised