THE PURPOSE :

The Business Architecture Executive Manager works within the Technology Office and is a senior “hinge” between Business & Technology and between strategy & execution. They support business evolution through innovation, transformation, and operational excellence. Business Architecture is one of the key strategic enablers that will help AXA become a Tech-Led company and their role is to ensure that, within Group, Business Architecture (BA) fulfils its purpose to:

• Increase the value of delivered by AXA GO's investment spend.
• Building models that describe the organization and helping it to align strategies to action, and ensure that transformation is delivered across organizational boundaries
• Align Technology with the business and strategy with execution at strategy, portfolio, and project level.
• Represent the business visually and use this view to frame the business focus, shaping what needs to be done and providing plans that show dependencies and overlaps.
• Optimise transversal consistency and convergence by eliminating duplication, redundancy, and poor choices.
• Disambiguate customers’ needs and reduce the time and cost of transformation.

THE MAIN ACTIVITIES :

Leadership Activities

• Facilitate AXA’s drive to improve its Business Architecture maturity consistent with, and inclusive of, entity needs.
• Manage the AXA GO Business Architecture function. This includes all organizational definition, resourcing and recruitment required to make this successful.
• Lead and coach the staff that make up this function ensuring that they have appropriate objectives and the environment to enable successful delivery of these.
• Ensure consistency between the AXA GO BA team and both entity BA functions and related central teams (e.g. ONE Technology, Innovation, Group Strategy etc.).

AXA GO Business Architecture Activities

• Act as a reference point for business and technology stakeholders in AXA GO on BA challenging and influencing their decisions to support AXA’s global strategy.
• Lead AXA GO Business Architecture as a challenging partner to executive management and other stakeholders in creation of the AXA GO strategy and strategic investment portfolio.
• Manage the delivery of Business Architecture definitions and initiation support for all projects managed by Group IT and any agreed transversal projects.

Strategy and Portfolio Activities

• Work with AXA GO Strategy and technology to ensure that AXA GO strategies are formalized and aligned with customer needs.
• Ensure that these strategies are mapped to common shared capabilities/values streams.
• Work with the Strategic Projects team and entities to define a Strategic Investment Portfolio.
• Create delivery plans that reflect the needs of the target architecture, business and delivery dependencies.
• Work with the SPC process to ensure that BA alignment for Group Operations Strategic initiatives is in place.
• Challenge projects to eliminate gaps, inconsistencies and duplication.

Practice Support

• Ensure and contribute to BA best practice deployment and adoption within local entities
• Support entities to make sure their maturity assessment on BA best practice as defined by the BA Community (BAWG: Business Architecture Working Group)

THE PROFILE :

Experience

• Overall Experience 10-15 years with various positions within technology organization
• Good insurance business knowledge and ability to conduct research.
• In depth Technology knowledge and understanding of related transformation disciplines (e.g. strategic planning, portfolio management, change management etc).
• Knowledge of related architecture or operational disciplines (e.g. data architecture, product or process design).
• Proven experience of function set up and ongoing team management.

Attitude

• Open-minded and trustworthy.
• Showing the drive and courage required to take the initiative and challenge ambiguity and tradition.
• Willing to serve the overall objective of enterprise-wide consistency above local goals.

Capabilities

• Capacity for observation and intuition so that they are perceptive to others’ reactions.
• Collaborative and respectful so as to perform their “hinge” function in a multi-disciplinary context.
• Showing an ability to resolve multi-factor problems, resolve conflicts and “think out of the box.”
• Showing the confidence and maturity required to interact with and persuade executive level stakeholders.

Soft Skills

• Communication, persuasion and advocacy with strong listening, spoken and written messaging in a multi-language environment.
• Analytical, logical and interpretive ability at a management level to interpret scenarios, express concepts or models and make the decisions required to maintain consistency across a broad scope.
• Education, influencing and persuasion to successfully advocate the function and its benefits at an executive level.
• Managerial skills in hierarchical and functional environment.

We bring together the expertise, cultural diversity and creativity of over 8,000 employees worldwide and we’re committed to equal opportunities in all aspects of employment (gender, LGBT+, disabled persons, or people of different origins) and to promoting Diversity & Inclusion by creating a work environment where all employees are treated with dignity and respect, and where individual differences are valued.