Chief Enterprise Architect – Information Technology

Alberta Blue Cross® is an Alberta based organization dedicated to delivering exceptional customer experience and community leadership. We’re committed to providing the best health coverage to over 1.8 million members and take an active role in promoting wellness. We believe in what we do—and place trust in our employees to deliver our vision.

Working at Alberta Blue Cross® means having a career where you’ll be recognized for your contributions. We value diversity, encourage our employees to maintain a healthy work-life balance and provide opportunities for career growth.

OVERVIEW:

We have an exciting opportunity in our dynamic Information Technology team. The Chief Enterprise Architect (CEA) will guide transformation and optimization initiatives, supporting the formation and realization of digital and technology strategy and driving innovation opportunities.  Responsibilities will include enabling the organization to achieve targeted business outcomes for revenue growth, optimizing costs, and mitigating risks.  You will focus on building relationships with business and IT team members, communicating the value of enterprise architecture (EA) and shaping and guiding the delivery of EA services.

You will support business and IT leaders in facilitating the decision-making process and providing actionable recommendations on initiatives and policies to help drive targeted business outcomes.  You will also support business leaders in achieving business outcomes and understand, monetize, and operationalize existing, new, and emerging technologies.  You will lead, prioritize, and develop the overall EA approach for the organization and communicate architectural direction. 

WHAT YOU WILL DO:

Manage the Enterprise Architecture Practice

• Develop the EA practice
  • Lead the EA practice into an internal management consultancy that offers a portfolio of EA services.
  • Lead the development of the EA service portfolio, ensuring alignment with the needs of the organization.

• Develop the EA team
  • Recruit and develop the critical skills, competencies and career paths for the EA team members.  In particular, building the business and behavioural competencies needed to support delivery of EA services.

• Design the EA operating model
  • Identify organizational requirements for the EA resources, structures, and cultural changes necessary to support agility and adaptability.
  • Help the enterprise find the right balance between enterprise risk and agility.

Formulate Strategy and Guide Execution

• Work with business and leadership to develop strategy
  • Understand disruptive forces and business economic and financial levers that are susceptible to digital transformation in order to effectively guide investment decisions.
  • Lead the analysis of business and operating models, market trends and the technology industry to determine potential impact on business strategy, direction, and architecture.
  • Use business architecture, planning-driven, design-driven, and learning-driven approaches to construct future and current state business models.

• Connect strategy to execution
  • Facilitate business and IT alignment through a collaborative, supportive and consultative manner, driving digital business strategies and balancing innovation and growth.
  • Formulate, translate, and execute business strategy to achieve targeted business outcomes by leading the development of an implementation roadmap.
  • Construct technology enabled business and operating models and provide viable options and visibility into execution issues.

Facilitate Innovation

• Collect, analyze, review, and refine innovations, trends, disruptions, opportunities, or ideas
  • Assess disruptive forces impacting the organization and identify technology-enabled innovation opportunities that enable business strategy.
  • Contextualize technology trends based on social, economic, political and other nontechnology trends.
  • Scan emerging technologies and the business ecosystem for major disruptive technology and nontechnology trends  that affect business. Provide practical advice and best practices to take advantage of new, or emerging, opportunities and deliver the expected business outcomes.

• Develop, track and manage execution of innovations, trends disruptions, opportunities, or ideas
  • Detail potential competitive threats from digital enterprises that are generally considered outside the traditional realm of competition.
  • Track and apply innovative technologies, anchoring them in the business and operating model to assess their potential, and use agile and lean approaches to evolve and manage innovation.
  • Partner with the data team to run technology experiments to create new products and services.

Build and Maintain relationships

• Build the EA value proposition and structure business engagement
  • Build the EA practice to become an internal management consultancy, offering services and skills to support and orchestrate the development and execution of business strategy.
  • Develop a portfolio of consulting services, designed to meet business and leadership needs, delivering them in an agile manner.
  • Determine the relationship between people, processes, information, technology and other components of the enterprise, and their relationships to one another and to the external environment.

• Enable value based messaging and manage cross functional relationships.
  • Act as a trusted partner by providing consultative advice and actionable recommendations in order to make investment decisions about business and operating models, using technology to make that change happen.
  • Lead and facilitate interaction with business leaders, product managers and product owners in business driven conversations about the risks and implications of product decisions for lines of business, business units, and the wider enterprise.

Orchestrate the delivery of business outcomes

• Develop consumable business architecture guidance
  • Ensure the EA practice is designed and enabled to help formulate, translate and execute business strategy.
  • Develop diagnostic and consumable deliverables that help guide investment decisions in support of the execution of business strategy and provide direction on business and operating model change.
  • Ensure business architecture guidance and recommendations are delivered effectively.

• Bring alignment across business and IT
  • Guide a collaborative, cross functional approach to mapping the current and future state of business capabilities, value streams, and IT environment.
  • Identify organizational requirements for the resources, structures and cultural changes necessary to support the enterprise architecture.
  • Orchestrate future state architecture delivery across business and IT functions to meet business and IT expectations.
  • Ensure the EA organizational design process leads to a more efficient and effective business and IT operating model, significantly improved results.

Plan and manage IT portfolio

• Support portfolio modernization and develop roadmaps
  • Present gap analysis and/or IT investment roadmaps that reflect the status of the existing IT landscape, namely its ability to contribute to future state business capabilities around ecosystems and digital platforms.
  • Lead analysis of the IT environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement.
  • Lead the development of an implementation plan for the EA, based on business requirements and the varying IT strategies for project driven or product driven delivery teams.

• Support solution delivery
  • Develop and apply standards and minimal viable architectures through the EA governance model.  Clarify accountability and provide the focal point for agile, effective and efficient decision making.
  • Facilitate a collaborative relationship across the architecture, product management, and product delivery teams.
  • Collaborate with delivery teams to ensure consistency with the EA, as well as to leverage shared technologies, tools and processes that impact speed to value and time to market.
  • Collaborate with infrastructure teams to ensure consistency with the EA, as well as to identify when it is necessary to modify the EA.

WHAT YOU WILL HAVE:

• Minimum of 5 years experience in a strategic role within IT.
• Bachelor’s degree in business, computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, system analysis or a related field.
• Minimum 10 years business experience in strategic and operations planning and/or business analysis.
• Minimum 10 years experience in at least three disciplines, such as business, information, solution or technical architecture, application development, middleware, information analysis, database management, or operations in a multitier environment.
• Knowledge of business models, operating models, financial models, cost-benefit and trade-off analysis, budgeting, and risk management.
• Knowledge of business ecosystems, software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), SOA, APIs, open data, microservices, event-driven IT and predictive analytics.
• 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.
• Understanding of the different types of agile principles, methodologies and frameworks, especially those designed to be scaled at enterprise level.
• Understanding of existing, new and emerging technologies, such as generative AI and its applications.
• Knowledge of all components of EA, business and IT principles, and processes.
• Familiarity with EA tools, graphical modeling approaches and repository management.
• Excellent analytical, planning and organizational skills.
• Excellent written, verbal, communication and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate new ideas and concepts to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Strong leadership skills, along with exceptional soft and interpersonal skills, including in teamwork, facilitation and negotiation.
• Strong consulting skills, such as in targeted communications, engagement management, stakeholder management and business development.
• Organizationally savvy, with situational and contextual intelligence about the political climate of the enterprise and how to navigate obstacles and politics.
• Balance long term and short term implications of individual decisions and organization goals.
• Trusted and respected as a thought leader who can influence and persuade business and IT leaders.
• Comfortable, experienced and accomplished at working with business executives, and able to handle challenge in a professional and diplomatic way.
• Highly collaborative and supportive of business and of its ideals and strategies.
• Highly innovative, with aptitude for foresight, systems thinking and design thinking.
• Composed in the face of opposition to architectural principles, governance and standards.
• Practical in approach to problem solving and decision making.

This position will remain open until a suitable candidate is selected.

Alberta Blue Cross® is an inclusive employer committed to a workplace that reflects the diversity of the communities we serve. We empower and are advocates for our employees by welcoming, respecting and valuing their unique perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences.

We offer a competitive salary and benefits package and the opportunity to work in an innovative, high-energy team-focused environment. If you have the qualifications we are looking for, please apply.