Senior Enterprise Architect

Senior Enterprise Architect

Job Overview

Springer Nature is seeking to hire a Senior Enterprise Architect (EA) to join our Enterprise Architecture team to proactively and holistically work across different levels within an organisation to translate the business strategy into business change and to help mature our Architecture practice to optimize strategy execution whilst minimizing our risk profile.

The Enterprise Architecture team scope of activities includes helping the organization achieve targeted business outcomes related to growing revenue, optimizing costs, mitigating risks and optimising innovation. The team will be focused on building relationships with business and technology stakeholders, facilitate our Architecture Community of Practice, communicating the value of core architectural approaches, and joining technical platforms and solutions with business goals and outcomes. 

In this role, you will work in a team of Enterprise Architects to:

• understand the organisation’s ecosystem and its interdependencies, including reference architectures
• take a strategic view across all architectural domains, portfolios and programmes
• guide the organisation to make appropriate business, technology and data decisions by recommending reuse, sustainability and scalability, to achieve value for money and reduce risk
• establish architectural principles, policies and standards
• collaborate and consult with stakeholders to assure business, technology and data decisions are aligned with enterprise architecture strategy
• develop the Architecture community
• carry out trend scouting and horizon scanning across the industry, identifying emerging trends and their potential impact and opportunity for the organisation
• identify priorities for change to enable delivery at pace
• lead and influence the delivery of cross-cutting capabilities that enable change
• develop the enterprise architecture vision, strategy and roadmaps from a business, technology and data perspective, including ‘as is’, ‘to be’ and transitional states
• consult and support collaboration across the business
• Provide due diligence assessment of company and technical investment opportunities 

Skills required for the role:

• Commercial perspective. You can understand and contribute to commercial contracts, procurement, sourcing and exit strategies. You can contribute to supplier selection and evaluation processes. You can implement effective sourcing strategies that meet organisational needs.
• Communicating between the technical and non-technical. You can communicate effectively across organisational, technical and political boundaries, understanding the context. You can make complex and technical information and language simple and accessible for non-technical audiences. You can advocate on behalf of a team and communicate what it does, to create trust and authenticity. You can successfully respond to challenges.
• Community collaboration. You can contribute to the work of the community, building successful teams through understanding team styles and influencing and motivating team members. You can give and receive constructive feedback, enabling the feedback loop. You can moderate conflict resolution within teams. You can ensure that the team is transparent and that the work is understood externally. You can help teams maintain a focus on delivery while being aware of the importance of architectural practice.
• Design, technology & data perspective. You can demonstrate an understanding of user-centred design, technology and data perspectives. You can understand the range of available technology choices and can make informed decisions based on user need and value for money. You can understand the variety and complexities of business system, digital and data contexts, and can design services to meet them. You can demonstrate knowledge of the wider digital economy and advances in technology.
• Enterprise and business architecture. You can demonstrate a strong understanding of enterprise architecture and its subdomains. You can understand the organisational landscape and strategy of an organisation, and can support the creation of future state architecture aligned to strategy. You can translate business drivers, goals and constraints into business objectives. You can define required capabilities and support organisational changes to create operating models that meet business objectives. You can describe and influence relationships between organisational structures, processes, technology, people and skills within and outside of an enterprise, to achieve transition to the new state.
• Governance and assurance. You can understand technical governance. You can participate in or deliver the assurance of a service.
• Making and guiding decisions. You can make and guide effective decisions, explaining clearly how the decision has been reached. You can understand and resolve technical disputes across varying levels of complexity and risk.
• Problem and context analysis and shaping. You can look beyond the immediate problem and identify the wider implications across the whole enterprise. You can understand relevant historical context and future impact, and how current work fits in broader contexts and strategies. You can identify underlying problems and opportunities, and carry out horizon scanning to identify future threats or opportunities.
• Strategic design and business change. You can demonstrate a strong understanding of business issues, events and activities, and their short to long term impact. You can define principles, patterns, standards, policies, roadmaps and vision statements. You can effectively focus on outcomes rather than solutions and activities. You can develop, maintain or update strategy in response to feedback and findings.
• Managing Complexity. You are able to work effectively in a highly complex, diverse, changing environment. You have the ability to maintain a high level of performance under conditions of increased pressure, competition and adversity. 
• Proving Consulting Services - working with technical and non technical colleagues and programmes bring a range of consulting advice, guidance and quality assurance that is needed and delivered in a timely efficient manner. 

Your experience so far includes

• Excellent written and spoken command of the English language
• Extensive experience as an EA practitioner incl.
  • Wide base knowledge across the breadth of technical areas found in a large enterprise (Business Systems, DevOps, Infrastructure and Operations inc. cloud technologies, Security, SaaS services)
  • Experience of working with Business Leadership, e.g. Business or Product leaders, to define and align technology strategies with strategic objectives, participating in strategic and financial planning cycles
  • Experience collaborating with members of the C-suite and Senior IT Leadership, in governance, conflict and strategic alignment scenarios
  • Experience defining and leading agile architecture governance and assurance bodies as part of overall IT management and governance 
  • Experience of adopting and adapting enterprise architectural methodologies and frameworks, relevant industry associations and reference models and the tools or notations used to define and communicate architectures with all stakeholder groups
• Solid consultancy skills based on experience
• Exceptional soft and interpersonal skills, including community building, facilitation and negotiation.
• Strong leadership skills.
• Excellent written, verbal, communication and presentation skills with the ability to articulate new ideas and concepts to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Excellent planning and organizational skills.
• Experience of the Publishing industry  is highly desirable

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