Chief Enterprise Architect
Al-Futtaim Group
Total years of experience :26 years, 9 Months
Main responsibilities include
• Strategize:
o Based on the business strategic planning, develop the IT strategy to fulfil the business goals in an efficient and effective way
• Architect:
o Capture the baseline business, application, data, technology architectures and develop the target ones
o Capture the baseline business capabilities and propose the target ones, based on the business and IT strategic maps
o Develop solution architectures for the approved projects
o Optimize application roadmap
• Leadership
o Form, lead and develop the architecture team
o Define and evolve the architecture processes
o Measure performance and value
• Governance
o Manage architectural compliance
o Integrate with the overall IT governance processes
• Direct the team of Enterprise, Solution, Data and Infrastructure architecture
• Build and support IT enterprise, solution and data architecture to ensure business mission, strategy, and processes are aligned with IT strategy
• Work across different functions, define and execute strategic planning in support of the IT Strategy to drive common approaches, common information assets and common processes in the whole organization
• Work with the Application Managers & Project Managers to ensure that IT solutions support the business strategy
• Capture, document and understand the interaction between systems, databases, people and the business
• Thought leadership, defining points of view on emerging enterprise/system architecture trends
• Participate in the design of new systems, ensuring adherence to defined system and data architecture principles
• Work with project teams to ensure adherence to and understanding of corporate data standards
• Liaise with the business to support the management and maintenance of enterprise architecture principles, standards, and guidelines
• Ensure the overall enterprise, data and solution architectures are extensible and scalable to meet developing business needs
• Direct a team of 8 architects
• Provide IT strategy in line with the overall business strategy and vision; ensuring that the business capabilities and business targets are served in an optimal way through the IT capabilities and solution landscape.
• Design the target business and IT architectures based on the business and the IT strategy respectively, ensuring that the transformation goals are well served
• Direct the IT applications portfolio rationalization ensuring, that the total cost of ownership (OPEX and CAPEX) is minimized, while the business capabilities are improved, as far as efficiency and effectiveness are concerned
• Lead the enterprise responses to disruptive forces, in a proactive and holistic fashion, by providing strategy and technology guidance to the IT projects, advising on technologies and solutions
• Scrutinize the IT projects, ensuring adherence to the business targets, technology budgets as well as the required quality.
• Scrutinize the major IT projects of the Investec Group, ensuring adherence to the group’s architectural and business principles.
• Direct the architecture governance process
• Drive the IT solutions’ selection process, identifying candidate systems that comply with the business and IT strategy, target architecture directives and bring minimal disruption to the overall business processes
• Mentor and coach several IT team’s employees.
• Defined and managed the solution architecture in accordance to the TOGAF framework
• Direct a team of 2 architects
• Performed solution design by participating in the Business Architecture formulation, translating Business requirements to Architecture requirements as well as documenting the baseline, target and transition Application, Data and Technology architectures, depicting various viewpoints according to the target audience, in accordance to the TOGAF framework
• Managed solution development scheduling by designing the transition architectures and defining implementation program with the project management team, in accordance to the PMI and PRINCE best practises
• Managed solution development as the single point of contact between the IT department and the project organization by monitoring the implementation work for conformance with the architecture and providing architectural oversight of the implementation
• Managed solution testing by providing subject matter expert advice to the testing team
• Defined solution operations to ensure the effective life of the deployed solutions by defining the operations framework needed to support it, in accordance to the ITIL framework
• Supported the solution Go-live and early life support by providing architectural and subject matter expert oversight to the go-live phase
Evaluated the status of Enterprise Architecture of several companies, created roadmap to reach higher maturity level and produced gap analysis. Identified solutions and produced specifications for multiple projects. Spearheaded business process management and automation project from inception to delivery at Qatar Petroleum on Doha/Qatar supervising a 12 people strong team. Analysed business requirements. Conducted pre-sales for telecommunications, government and banking industry sectors. Prepared bids for projects up to $300 Millions.