Solution Architect
November 29 2024
Industries
Education, Training
Categories Systems architect, Design
Remote
Calgary, AB • Part time
The Opportunity
The solutions architect proactively and holistically leads and supports Enterprise Architecture (EA) activities that guide the development and management of a portfolio of solutions. Solutions include projects and products, systems (including applications, technologies, processes and information), shared infrastructure services and shared application services.
They understand the concepts of business goals, objectives and business outcomes, business capabilities, value-streams and business processes and their importance in solution architecture. The solutions architect provides the necessary leadership, analysis and design tasks related to support the development of technology solutions to ensure that solutions meet business needs and align with architectural governance and standards.
They create deliverables for managing the organization's portfolio of "to be" and "as is" solutions — including systems (applications, processes, information and technology), shared infrastructure services, and shared application services and components to enable and drive targeted business outcomes.
This role requires leadership skills, technical expertise, analytical skills and a customer-service focus. While the position typically works regular office hours, it may require afterhours, shift work, and long hours during peak times.
The Role
- Financial Management
- Strategic Planning and Oversight
- Assist the Associate Director of Enterprise Architecture in gathering requirements of business functions and projects to be incorporated into consolidated technology roadmaps and strategic plans
- Operations, Compliance, Governance
- Provides deliverables like standard definitions, reference models and architecture designs to support architectural governance to assess the impact of new and ongoing technology investment on the business and IT estate (note: The level of detail and complexity in deliverables would vary depending on a solutions architect's level of responsibility in the organization chart)
- Supports a community of practice (CoP), guiding and helping agile teams, product owners to align with the overall enterprise architecture governance and assurance
- Designs and directs the governance activities associated with ensuring solutions architecture assurance and compliance
- Defines the principles, guidelines, standards and solution patterns to ensure solution decisions are aligned with the enterprise's future-state architecture vision.
- Leadership and Development
- Enhance decision making.
- Use tools such as business information models to provide the organization with a future-state view of the information landscape that is unencumbered by the specific data implementation details imposed by proprietary solutions or technologies.
- Assist decision design.
- Conduct business information modeling.
- Create and manage business information models in all their forms, including conceptual models, relational database designs, message models and others.
- Interpret Business Needs
- Translates business and technical requirements into an architectural blueprint to achieve business objectives and documents all solution architecture design and analysis work
- Works closely with the product owners and product managers to ensure a robust architectural runway that can support future business requirements throughout the product life cycle
- Understands business drivers and business capabilities (future and current state) and determines corresponding enterprise solution designs and change requirements to drive the organization's targeted business outcomes
- Assess Technology
- Monitors the current-state solution portfolio to identify deficiencies through aging of the technologies used by the application, or misalignment with business requirements
- Monitors micro- and macroscopic trends in EA as well as global currents, including economic, political, social/cultural, environmental, regulatory/legal and/or technological disruptions for effective decision-making
- Supports product managers in end-of-life product decisions to maintain, refresh or retire services or systems, including applications, technologies, processes and information
- Understands emerging technology trends and disruptions and their practical application to enable new and evolving business and operating models
- Analyzes the technology industry, competitors and market trends, and determines their potential implications for a given solution
- Analyzes the business-IT environment to detect critical deficiencies, legacy and technical debt, and also recommends solutions for improvement
- Facilitates the evaluation, selection and Total cost of Ownership (TCO) of software product standards and services, as well as the design of standard and custom software configurations
- Consults with application and infrastructure development projects and products to fit systems or infrastructure to architecture and identify when it is necessary to modify designs to accommodate the solutions architecture
- Technology Application
- Leads evaluation, design and analysis for the implementation of a solutions architecture across a group of specific business applications or technologies based on enterprise business strategy, business capabilities, value-streams, business requirements and enterprise standards
- Manages and develops the architecture for a broader scope of projects or products, working closely with application architects that manage and design architecture for a single project or product or initiative
- Develops a roadmap for the evolution of the enterprise solution portfolio from current to future state, as defined by the solutions architecture
- Acts as a consultant on a broad range of technologies, platforms and vendor offerings to drive targeted business outcomes
- Creates architectural designs to guide and contextualize solution development across products, services, projects and systems, including applications, technologies, processes and information
- Works closely with the program management office (PMO) or project management office to ensure the execution of plans corresponds with what is being promised throughout the project or product life cycle
- Provides consulting support to application architects within agile teams to ensure the project or product is aligned with the overall enterprise architecture
Qualifications
- Minimum Required
- Post-secondary degree or diploma in a relevant field
- A minimum of five years of experience in at least two IT solution development disciplines, including technical or infrastructure architecture, network management, application development, middleware, database management or cloud development.
- A broad, enterprise-wide view of the business and demonstrated experience aligning strategy, processes and capabilities, and governance.
- Exposure to multiple, diverse technologies, platforms and processing environments
- Good understanding of strategic and emerging technology trends, and the practical application of existing and emerging technologies to new and evolving business and operating models
- Good understanding of product management, agile principles and development methodologies and capability of supporting agile teams by providing advice and guidance on opportunities, impact and risks, taking account of technical and architectural debt
- Experience developing architecture blueprints, strategies and roadmaps
- Experience delivering presentations to senior-level executives and technical audiences
- Preferred
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, information-technology, engineering, system analysis or a related study
- 5+ years of experience within Higher Education
- 3+ years of experience in creating and maintaining enterprise architecture supporting emerging technologies including machines learning, artificial intelligence and predictive and prescriptive data analytics.
- AWS Certified Solution Architect
- Axelos ITIL Master certification
- Dell EMC Proven Professional Cloud architect training and certification
- Google Professional Cloud Architect
- Professional Cloud Solutions Architect Certification
- Red Hat Certified Architect
- Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA)
- The Open Group TOGAF 9 Certification
- The Open Group Certified Architect (Open CA)
- Virtualization Council Master Infrastructure Architect certification
- Skills
- Demonstrated experience designing and developing campus wide business solutions and cloud strategies that drove innovation and improved efficiency in line with emerging technology strategy.
- Demonstrated knowledge in the use of micro service architecture in reducing development complexity.
- Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate trends in higher education practices and supporting technology systems.
- Demonstrated experience using Private, Public, and Hybrid Cloud compute space in the delivery of innovative technical solutions, with a focus on scalable, reliable, and resilient platform design.
Job Classification: P2041 - Systems Analyst II
Salary Range: $72,000 - $121,000
Posting End Date: December 6th, 2024
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