Purpose & Overall Relevance for the Organization:
The design and communication of high-level structures to enable and guide the design and development of integrated solutions that meet current and future business needs. In addition to technology components, solution architecture encompasses changes to service, process, organisation, and operating models. The provision of comprehensive guidance on the development of, and modifications to, solution components to ensure that they take account of relevant architectures, strategies, policies, standards and practices (including security) and that existing and planned solution components remain compatible. Overall solution architecture and IT governance in R2R area with focus on Finance Consolidation, IFRS and Local GAAP Reporting and SAP S4HANA Finance solutions implementation, including SAP S4HANA for Group reporting.
Key Responsibilities:
Specialist advice
- Actively maintains recognised expert level knowledge in one or more identifiable specialisms.
- Provides definitive and expert advice in their specialist area(s).
- Oversees the provision of specialist advice by others, consolidates expertise from multiple sources, including third party experts, to provide coherent advice to further organisational objectives.
- Supports and promotes the development and sharing of specialist knowledge within the organisation.
Research
- Within given research goals, builds on and refines appropriate outline ideas for research, including evaluation, development, demonstration and implementation.
- Applies standard methods to collect and analyse quantitative and qualitative data.
- Creates research reports to communicate research methodology and findings and conclusions. Contributes sections of material of publication quality.
- Uses available resources to update knowledge of any relevant field and curates a personal collection of relevant material.
- Participates in research communities.
Emerging technology monitoring
- Supports monitoring of the external environment and assessment of emerging technologies to evaluate the potential impacts, threats and opportunities to the organisation.
- Contributes to the creation of reports, technology roadmapping and the sharing of knowledge and insights.
Solution architecture
- Contributes to the development of solution architectures in specific business, infrastructure or functional areas.
- Identifies and evaluates alternative architectures and the trade-offs in cost, performance and scalability.
- Produces specifications of cloud-based or on-premises components, tiers and interfaces, for translation into detailed designs using selected services and products.
- Supports a change programme or project through the preparation of technical plans and application of design principles that comply with enterprise and solution architecture standards (including security).
Business analysis
- Investigates operational needs and problems, and opportunities, contributing to the recommendation of improvements in automated and non-automated components of new or changed processes and organisation.
- Assists in defining acceptance tests for these recommendations.
Requirements definition and management
- Contributes to selection of the requirements approach for projects, selecting appropriately from predictive (plan-driven) approaches or adaptive (iterative/agile) approaches.
- Defines and manages scoping, requirements definition and prioritisation activities for initiatives of medium size and complexity.
- Facilitates input from stakeholders, provides constructive challenge and enables effective prioritisation of requirements.
- Reviews requirements for errors and omissions. Establishes the requirements base-lines, obtains formal agreement to requirements, and ensures traceability to source.
- Investigates, manages, and applies authorised requests for changes to base-lined requirements, in line with change management policy.
Systems design
- Designs components using appropriate modelling techniques following agreed architectures, design standards, patterns and methodology.
- Identifies and evaluates alternative design options and trade-offs. Creates multiple design views to address the concerns of the different stakeholders of the architecture and to handle both functional and non-functional requirements.
- Models, simulates or prototypes the behaviour of proposed systems components to enable approval by stakeholders.
- Produces detailed design specification to form the bas