The Associate Director, IT Business Partner-Finance

JOB PURPOSE

The Associate Director, IT Business Partner-Finance serves as the strategic interface between IT and specific business units across the geography for the purposes of business technology alignment, technological needs identification, solution discovery, and relationship management. Collaborate across functional areas and OpCos to define opportunities and identify and prioritize demand based on predefined criteria while ensuring there is no deviation from the strategic and technology roadmaps.

This role leads a team of  Senior IT Business Analysts, ensuring demand and change activities are aligned and managed in accordance with both IT and commercial strategy.

The incumbent needs to understand Finance functional requirements & processes to identify business technology and/or process opportunities including process automation, data analytics and RPA, working with business & IT managers to develop, implement and maintain solutions which deliver business value within agreed timelines and budget.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

·  Acts as Senior Partner for the specific business function with respect to new requirements (projects, system enhancement requests, availability and disaster recovery requirements, capacity requirements, etc.)

·  Accountable for Finance IT functional planning and prioritization of business demand in an efficient and effective manner.

·  Responsible for strategic thinking and solutioning, identifying ways to create optimal usage of technology resources to deliver maximum business benefit.

·  Leads the annual IT planning cycle for specific Finance function, as well as structuring, capturing, and estimating demand forecast on an ongoing basis.

·  Partner with the Business Process Owner(s) and Process Excellence Team members to develop a deep end-to-end understanding of finance processes targeted for automation and outline the impacted processes and business requirements.

·  Keep up to date with developments in technology and best practices, continuously researching advancements in the fields and potential utilisation of it with focus on Process Automation

·  Provide and support the implementation of business solutions by building relationships and partnerships with key stakeholders; identifying business needs; determining and carrying out necessary processes and practices; monitoring progress and results; recognizing and capitalizing on improvement opportunities; and adapting to competing demands, organizational changes and new responsibilities.

·  Collaborate closely with developers to implement the requirements, provide necessary guidance to testers during QA process.

·  Leads resource planning and management for specific business function, balancing functional demand with IT capacity and capability.

·  Attends relevant business and IT forums to align requirements with planned activities in day-to-day operations between business units and IT.

·  Provide direction and oversight to IT Business Analysts to enable the production of a prioritized roadmap to meet business demand.

·  Leads a team of IT Business Analysts, managing workload and assignments across business functions / programme delivery. 

·  Provides expert advice, issue escalation and resolution, partnering with Senior Stakeholders and IT Delivery Managers in project / programme delivery.

·  Contributes as an active member of the Demand team to support the formulation, and review, of IT strategic plans.

·  Implements appropriate governance and control frameworks to best manage business demand pipeline.

·  Identifies and shares best practice tools, methodologies and processes relating to Demand Management across the Demand team.  

·  Working with the Director, IT Demand, develops and implements governance, risk, and control frameworks to optimally manage and track delivery against project and enhancement roadmap and project portfolio.

·  Advises business functions on innovative / new technology to shape and implement demand management processes.

·  Implements and tracks agreed Demand Management KPIs.  

·  Tracks and manages IT demand related issues and project delivery progress for reporting / escalation as appropriate to Director, Demand.  

·  Supports the creation of information packs as required to create transparency over the demand pipeline, the status of current in-flight projects as well as day-to-day operations performance metrics of IT.

·  Collaborate with the enterprise architecture and operations team to design solutions that support business processes and align with enterprise-wide strategies and business architecture.