Business Architect- Edinburgh or Cheshire East

FDM is a global business and technology consultancy seeking a Business Architect to work for our client within the insurance sector. This is initially a 6 month contract with the potential to extend and will be a hybrid role based in Edinburgh or Cheshire East.

Our client is seeking a Business Architect to guide the enterprise executives through transformation and optimisation initiatives, supporting the formulation of business strategy, outcomes and capabilities. The Business Architect's scope of activities includes helping the organisation achieve targeted business outcomes related to growing revenue, optimising costs and mitigating risks. You would focus on development of the business strategy and business architecture of the organisation, ensuring adherence to the strategic design principles and governance framework.

 Responsibilities:

Supports Business Strategy Formulation

• Assesses market trends, disruptive forces, economic and financial levers, and competitive threats and opportunities to guide transformation, digitalisation and optimisation initiatives.
• Engages key enterprise stakeholders to facilitate and develop business and technology innovation opportunities that enable and drive business strategy, including economic and political analysis, opportunity identification, technology and business cases, and business innovation portfolio development along with operating model development
• Focuses on growing revenue, optimise costs, and mitigate risks, leveraging best practices of continuous foresight to test and adjust business models and strategies for resilience

Enables Organisational Change and Investments

• Constructs deliverables that guide the business towards realising its strategic goals and targeted business outcomes.
• Provides actionable insights, diagnostic deliverables frameworks and toolsets for informed investment priorities and decisions across time horizons.
• Uses various business architecture tools to aid in decision-making, including, business outcome statements, strategy on a page, scenario plans, capability models, value-streams maps, process models, journey maps and investment roadmaps.

Facilitates Business and Operating Model Design and Innovation

• Works with business and IT leaders in understanding and articulating their business and operating models, creating effective communication and targeted messaging to support transformation objectives.
• Innovates using existing business models and new technologies to enhance business capabilities. Promotes adoption and reuse of technology, and modern practices.

Aligns Business and IT

• Helps business leaders and units with design thinking, business modelling, innovation management, IT investment analysis, and operating model design.
• Facilitates cross-business solutions using knowledge of business capabilities, value streams and processes.
• Advises solution architects on risks, costs, benefits, and impact on business capabilities and processes, and supports architecture governance.
• Collaborates with the Program Management Office (PMO) on initiative benefits, issues and risks to report project status and supports Change governance.
• Collaborates with delivery teams to ensure continuous delivery of business outcomes and manage the evolution of business architecture against strategic outcomes.
• Participates in the development of guiding principles, standards, and governance frameworks, actively engaging to identify architecture issues early in projects.

Forges Customer Centricity

• Advocates design thinking within product teams. Collaborating with Principal Architects to ensure continuous delivery of business value, leverage shared technologies, tools across value streams and processes that impact speed to value and time to market.
• Develops business capability models, value stream models, customer journey maps and business process models to guide product teams in creating minimum viable products and value propositions.

• Minimum 7 years of experience in a similar role.
• Expertise in strategy formulation and/or translation preferably for Pensions, Protection, Assurance Industry.
•  Experience developing and monitoring efficient and effective solutions to diverse and complex business problems.
•  Knowledge and understanding of different types of business and operating models (existing, new, emerging and hybrid).
•  Ability to assess the value and risk of existing, new and emerging technologies against new business designs and business models to achieve targeted business outcomes.
•  Knowledge in all aspects of designing and constructing business capabilities, value streams, journeys, business processes, and organisational structures.
•  Knowledge of business process management, workflow and integration methods and tools.
• Knowledge of EA tools to develop business architecture deliverables.
•  Comprehensive knowledge of facilitation of projects and products, and organisation change management.
• Strong analytical and conceptual skills; ability to create original concepts and theories for a variety of projects
• Knowledge of finance, accounting, valuation and metrics development (nice to have)
• Strong forecasting, statistical and information analysis skills

We are a business and technology consultancy and one of the UK's leading employers, recruiting the brightest talent to become the innovators of tomorrow. We have centres across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific, and a global workforce of over 2,500 Employees. FDM has shown exponential growth throughout the years, firmly establishing itself as an award-winning employer and is listed on the FTSE4Good Index. 

Diversity and Inclusion  

FDM Group is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other status protected by federal, provincial or local laws.