Enterprise Architect

 

Position Title: Enterprise Architect 

Location: Toronto – Hybrid 

Duration: 6 months 

 Summary:
The Enterprise Architect is a seasoned expert who takes leadership of, and performs the necessary analysis and design tasks related to, the development of an enterprise architecture for our client, within a functional specialty area of either: Technology, Security, Solution , or Information and Data. As the primary subject matter expert and consultant to senior client and IT management in their area of expertise, the Enterprise Architect partners to develop architecture designs and innovation proposals that address operational imperatives and/or provide a competitive advantage to the organization.
Roles and responsibilities:
Architectural Standards, Guidelines, and Governance:

• Ensure the enterprise architecture for specialty area maps to the overall enterprise architecture.
• Support the definition of standards and guidelines that pertain to specialty area (including defining accountabilities in support of mandates).
• Establish the standards and lifecycle management strategy that guide decisions for the enterprise.
• Apply, advocate and implement enterprise architecture strategies to solutions and projects.
• Participate in designing the governance activities associated with ensuring enterprise architecture compliance.
• Help to create an IT Systems Strategies and ensures technology is compliant with standards and architectural decisions.
• Propose strategies which meet long-term business objectives by introducing innovation through technology.
• Participate in key project design reviews as part of the methodology process to ensure infrastructure and application designs adhere to enterprise architecture guidelines and standards.
• Establish, communicate, and enforce design patterns, interface standards, and development guidelines.
• Promote standards adoption.
• Monitor compliance and related guidelines to determine impact on enterprise architecture.
• Influence and raise awareness to the enterprise architecture process, its outcome and ongoing results.

Architectural Design and Implementation:

• Design, develop and maintain all architecture models, assets, and processes for area of specialty.
• Develop enterprise architectures from current to future state for solutions, consistent with enterprise architecture landscapes and standards.
• Design and lead the implementation of an enterprise architecture based on business requirements and IT strategies, as well as address gaps, duplication and pain points within the current state.
• Analyze the current environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement; analyze business trends and strategy to derive applicable architecture.
• Analyze industry best practices and market trends, determine their potential impact on the enterprise, and provide leadership for adapting to our business. Evaluate emerging technologies and suggest suitable controls. Be responsive and decisive on adjusting architecture as customers’ requirements, market conditions and technology evolve.
• Ensure technical designs comply with applicable enterprise architecture standards, and designs are functionally and technically feasible.
• Partner with IT Solutions Delivery to facilitate the evaluation and selection of hardware and software technology and product standards, as well as the design of standard software and solution configurations.
• Oversee mapping of enterprise architecture models to package application models, to determine impact or assess suitability of vendor solutions to enterprise architecture requirements.
• Participate with new development activities and ensure they are consistent and well integrated with the established enterprise architecture.
• Translate strategic requirements into a usable solution architecture, which will then be used to guide enterprise solution development and achieve consistency across the application and technology portfolio.
• Validate technology ability to meet business, performance, integration, and scalability requirements for each project.
• Identify the organizational impact (i.e. on skills, processes, structures and culture) and financial impact of the enterprise architecture.
• Oversee, coordinate, or consult on enterprise architecture implementation and modification activities, particularly for new and shared infrastructure solutions.
• Assist in post-implementation continuous-improvement efforts to enhance performance and provide increased functionality. Consultation and Collaboration
• Consult with other architecture specialty areas to identify when it is necessary to modify the enterprise architectures to accommodate project needs.
• Collaborate as a key stakeholder with enterprise functions outside of specialty area.
• Interface with the business community to provide governance and design strategies.
• Advocate and identify the architecture principles and the architecture process, its outcome and ongoing results to project teams and stakeholders.
• Partner with program managers and development teams on oversight for all requirements to formulate appropriate architecture required to provide system functionality, deciding when to advocate and when to compromise to arrive at mutually acceptable solutions.
• Work with development teams to translate software architecture into design.
• Consult on application or infrastructure development projects to fit systems or infrastructure to the technical architecture, and identify when it is necessary to modify the architecture to accommodate project needs
• Coordinate with partners/vendors to ensure automated and auditable change, release and exception management processes.
• Provide advisory for risk mitigation.
• Work closely with the enterprise program management office to ensure alignment of process with architecture gates, and alignment with what is being delivered.

Responsibilities Specific to Information and Data Specialty:

• Lead the definition of integrative and canonical views of data or information across multiple content types (structured, semi structured, XML or unstructured) to support convergence of information asset migration planning or impact analysis.
• Ensure existing data/information assets are identified, stewarded and leveraged across the enterprise. Balance the need for access to information against security and performance requirements.
• Ensure a focus on information/data quality by developing and publishing enterprise data standards such as a common business vocabulary, naming conventions, data standards, transformation rules and related enterprise consistency specifications.
• Develop a model management strategy in support of enterprise reuse and data- sharing objectives.
• Construct, refine and maintain information models, as needed, to meet business requirements.
• Establish guidelines for reporting procedures on the reuse of enterprise information architecture artifacts.
• Drive data design and stewardship practices for large enterprise initiatives such as CRM.
• Leverage enterprise data quality toolsets to provide a platform that functions as the master file for enterprise customer identification.

Responsibilities Specific to Security Specialty:

• Support the definition of security strategies and solutions to ensure that Information Security of enterprise assets is designed into all conceptual and logical architectures.
• Ensure information security is built into enterprise architecture solutions to address all identified risks to assets within the organization, meet regulatory and legislative compliance while ensuring security solutions are leveraged across the organization.
• Prepare Security advisory on existing technology platforms. Provide assistance and support to the Enterprise Security Risk, Governance, Compliance and Operations functions.

Supervisory Responsibilities:
Direct Reports: Indirect Reports:
Budget Responsibilities:
The Enterprise Architect ensures that solutions meet complex requirements of business value, performance, sustainability and price. This includes ongoing operational costs.
Working Conditions:
Physical: Majority of time is spent on the computer Mental: Multiple tasking, fast paced environments, prioritizing large volumes of work and/or tight deadlines can increase the mental demands of the role.
Qualifications And Skills:

• • Bachelor’s degree in Business or Computer Science along with at least 16 years of progressive industry experience in IT.

 

• • Proven experience in multiple IT disciplines (e.g. technical architecture, network design/management, applications development, middleware, information analysis, servers and storage, database management, data centers and operations) in a large, complex shared services environment
  • In-depth experience designing and implementing information solutions, and creating policy to support effective design for use across the enterprise.
  • Experience writing proposals and translating complex solutions into simple business terms that demonstrate the value of architecture management initiatives
  • Ability to estimate the financial impact of architecture alternatives and recommend the optimum solution
  • Familiarity with Financial Services and Insurance regulatory items such as OSFI
  • Technical Competencies , Technology Specialty: Expert knowledge of all components of a technical architecture, including exposure to multiple, diverse technical configurations, technologies and processing environments. Security Specialty: Requires CISSP certification, plus the following certifications would be considered a major asset: GIAC GCSEC, SANS Technical certifications, TOGAF, SABSA. Deep understanding of key information security tools and concepts such as IAM, SSO, IPS, wireless security, firewalls, vulnerability management, penetration testing, VPN, PKI, LDAP, AD, SAML, SIEM, along with understanding of information security frameworks such as ISO 2700x, COBIT.  Requires 8+ years of direct information security architecture work experience, including in-depth experience designing and implementing information security solutions, and working with one or more enterprise architecture frameworks such as EISA, DoDAF, IAEAF, SABSA, TOGAF, ZACKMAN.  Solution Delivery Specialty: Knowledgeable in all major (industry standard) technical platforms and solutions. This breadth should be in areas of application development and deployment, and in the areas of creation and maintenance of the infrastructure to support the complex application environment.  Information & Data Specialty: Data/information modeling expertise at the enterprise level, including meta-model, relational database management systems and other data structures. Experience with enterprise master data management concepts, and data governance structures and tools.
  • Competencies  Ability to understand the long-term (“big picture”) and short-term implications and perspectives of situations.  Highly developed level of creative skills and resourcefulness; must apply critical thinking skills to determine best strategic approach and be results- orientated.  Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to translate complex technical concepts into understandable terms and is able to tailor communication to audience, mediate and facilitate communications between others, and communicate information architecture to all levels of management and customers.  Strong leadership skills, communicating and influencing business application owners/champions, users and 3rd party suppliers; must have the ability to gain buy-in from stakeholders on complex issues.  Ability to establish and maintain a high level of customer trust and confidence.  Strong competency to self-manage activities and priorities as an individual contributor leader.
• The successful candidate shall be subject to a Criminal Record and Consumer History background check as a condition of employment.