Head of IT Enterprise Architecture

Join the Spark Team

We were born of innovation, springing from the curiosity, imagination and dedication of remarkable scientists and healthcare visionaries. Our shared mission is to challenge the inevitability of genetic disease by discovering, developing, and delivering treatments in ways unimaginable – until now.

We don’t follow footsteps. We create the path.

The Head of IT Enterprise Architecture (EA) defines the holistic enterprise-wide architecture to address business strategy, problems, needs, and opportunities. The enterprise architect plays an integral role in building a holistic view and roadmap of Spark’s technology strategy, processes, and information technology roadmap. The Head of EA defines reusable standards, guidelines, patterns, and frameworks for application implementation projects.  They have extensive knowledge of architectural frameworks, methodologies, and tools. The Head of EA applies essential, unifying concepts and principles of IT systems, their components, and relationships to each other.

The Head of EA partners with both business and technology groups to ensure that proposed business and technical solutions align with Spark’s overall mission and vision.

Responsibilities

Build and Maintain Relationships:

• Lead and facilitate interaction with business leaders, project managers and solution owners to ensure that IT decisions are made with an understanding of their impact on the enterprise. 
• Understand the relationship between people, processes, information, and technology and their relationships to one another and to the external environment.
• Provide consultative advice to business leaders and organizational stakeholders who seek actionable recommendations to make investment decisions.
• Work with, and across IT Leadership and the business to ensure development of and compliance to standards to ensure seamless integration of data, process, and tools.
• Lead the creation or evolution of the enterprise architecture function, including the coordination of an appropriately balanced pursuit of enterprise information systems, data, technical, and solution architecture viewpoints
• Manage relationships with strategic product/service vendors to ensure alignment between their technical strategies and Spark business objectives
• Provide on-going guidance, mentoring, feedback and motivation to a staff to ensure competent performance while adhering to business function and Spark policies and procedures
• Continually look for ways to improve team’s performance by identifying and implementing work efficiencies through process improvement techniques and employee empowerment techniques
• Recommend and/or make decisions in personnel related matters (performance review, disciplinary actions, and terminations); this includes monitoring attendance, leave requests, ensure accuracy of hours worked and adherence to Spark policies and procedures

Plan and Manage the EA Blueprint and Roadmap

• Develop and present the aggregate, integrated IT roadmaps which reflect the status of the existing IT landscape, namely, its ability to contribute to future-state business capabilities.
• Facilitate a collaborative relationship across functional business areas, IT Business Partners, and project teams to analyze the IT environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement.
• Ensure the building of Spark Computing Environment across the domains of Application, Information and Infrastructure are aligned with, supportive of, our architecture strategies.
• Participate in the IT Business Partner annual review and planning of the IT solutions

Govern the Enterprise Architecture

• Establish and lead an Enterprise Architecture Group to ensure consistency of technologies, standards across the business.
• Responsible for overseeing the creation and implementation of Information Technology architectures necessary to preserve and enhance the effective and efficient use of technology by Spark. 
• Establish a strategic vendor architecture review process to ensure alignment of key vendors and their technology strategies & capabilities with Spark business objectives.
• Ensure IS/IT investments are appropriate and aligned with our architectural blueprint.
• Develop and maintain policies, standards, and guidelines to ensure that a consistent framework is applied across the Spark
• Lead and facilitate the creation of governing principles to guide solution decision making for the enterprise architecture
• Ensure that the optimal governance structure and compliance activities (such as handling waivers) are associated with enterprise architecture compliance
• Oversee enterprise architecture implementation, ongoing enterprise architecture refinement activities, and the documentation of all enterprise architecture design and analysis work
• Lead the development of the enterprise architecture strategy and develop the enterprise technology roadmap that is aligned with the business strategy
• Collaborate with the Business Aligned Strategic Partners (BASPs) in the identification and analysis of enterprise business drivers to derive enterprise business, information, technical and solution architecture requirements
• Collaborate with the BASPs to analyze the current business and IT environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement

Facilitate Innovation and Growth

• Keeps abreast of changes in relevant technology and best practices and look for opportunities to apply such changes within the organization.
• As needed, provide executive IT leadership, guidance, and counsel for mergers and acquisitions, development of strategic plans, enhancement of IT business processes, and evaluation of new opportunities and technologies.
• Remain current on industry specific knowledge and emerging technology

Education and Experience Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree required
• Master's degree preferred
• 15+ years of progressive experience in Leadership roles in global large scale business systems transformation projects or equivalent, including multi-national and multi-cultural experience.
• 10+ years of experience in Enterprise, solution or related (business, data, technology) architecture role or equivalent.
• Experience within a life sciences organization is strongly preferred
• Knowledge of Enterprise Architecture standards, processes, methods, reference models and frameworks, such as TOGAF

Key Skills, Abilities, and Competencies

• Balance the long-term (“big picture”) and short-term implications of individual decisions and organization goals.
• Understand and speak the language of the business.
• Planning and design experience of all components of holistic enterprise architecture.
• Awareness to emerging technologies, their capabilities and architecture covering and an ability to determine business benefit and impact.
• Ability to manage complex systems into meaningful actions and leading a major change initiative.
• Strong leadership and soft and interpersonal skills, including experience leading and directing cross functional project teams, team facilitation, negotiation, and people management.
• Excellent budget management and financial acumen with experience developing business cases and ongoing financial impact of investments.
• Excellent planning, organizational, analytical and technical skills.
• Excellent written, verbal, communication and presentation skills with the ability to articulate new ideas and concepts to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Familiarity with information management practices, system development life cycle management, IT services management, agile and lean methodologies, infrastructure and operations, and EA and ITIL frameworks.
• Strong understanding in modern enterprise cloud platforms and technologies / SaaS technologies  - Azure, Google, AWS
• Strong knowledge of General and Administrative, commercial, Research & Development, and technical operations life sciences functional business lines/processes and the applied core technologies to enable the organization to operate efficiently
• Proven experience in enterprise architecture and integration architecture - APIs, ESBs, ETL, REST/SOAP
• Knowledge of container strategies - (Kubernetes, EC2, Docker)
• Proven experience in data analytics - NoSQL, Data Lakes, Power BI/Tableau
• Ability to tie together solutions across systems
• Strong business acumen
• Knowledge of business process modeling
• Knowledge of required technologies (incl 3rd party solutions)
• Deep understanding of future technologies

Complexity and Problem Solving

• This role leads, prioritizes and develops the overall enterprise architecture approach for the organization, and communicates architectural direction. He or she has purview into (and may directly manage) other architecture-related activities and the respective roles (such as business, information, solution and technical). He or she works with every function to design and guide delivery of IT solutions.

This role leads and coordinates all aspects of the EA practice, including:

• Business Architecture: Focused on guiding people, process and organizational change
• Information Architecture: Focused on the consistent sharing of information across the enterprise
• Solutions Architecture: Focused on developing a direction for managing the portfolio of to-be solutions
• Technical Architecture: Focused on evolving the technical infrastructure
• Security Architecture: Focused on managing IT risk through the exchange of information between people, systems and things inside and outside the organization.
• Internal and External Contacts
• Consultative point of contact for senior leadership in support of advancing business strategies and goals with information and technology solutions.
• Primary interface for conducting IT strategy, capability advancement and multi-year road mapping to shape their portfolio of investments.
• Primary interface with the IT Business Partners, IT Delivery & Support leaders and project teams. 
• Vendor: Primary point of contact for vendor including oversight of managed services and consultant oversight as well collaborative architecture directions.
• Industry Institutional Thought Leaders: Collaborative relationships to explore potential opportunities to innovate on emerging technologies

Please be aware that Spark mandates COVID-19 vaccination of all employees regardless of work location.  Accommodations may be made in accordance with applicable law.

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