Director, Global It Strategy And Merger & Acquisitions

IKO Industries Ltd. is a market leader in the manufacturing of roofing and building materials. IKO is a Canadian owned and operated business with production facilities worldwide and has many years of unparalleled success in the roofing materials industry. Quality, integrity, and trustworthiness are the values that underlie this success, and we have built this company by hiring people who hold these values. People like you!
Background

The Focus Is To
The Director Global IT Strategy and M&A, proactively and holistically helps guide the enterprise through transformation and optimization initiatives, supporting the formulation of future strategy. The scope of activities includes helping the organization achieve targeted business outcomes related to grow revenue, optimizing costs and mitigating risks. They focus on building relationships with business and IT stakeholders, communicating the value of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and the services it offers, and shaping and guiding the delivery of services.

• Engage business and IT stakeholders, creating and building relationships
• Coach and mentor team members
• Facilitate alignment between business and IT,
• Design and build an EA team oriented around internal services
• Evaluate, support and plan for Merger and Acquisitions (M&A)
• Drive the evolution of the EA teams services and operating model
• Communicate the value of enterprise architecture, and its portfolio of services

Responsibilities
Manage the Enterprise Architecture (EA) Practice
Develop the EA Practice

• Leads the development of a value proposition and execution of a communication and education plan for the enterprise architecture practice. Promotes the business value of EA as an enabler of strategy formulation, and as support for technology innovation.
• Leads the creation and maturing of the enterprise architecture practice into an internal management consultancy.
• Leads the development of the EA service portfolio, ensuring they are aligned to the needs of the organization and EA’s key stakeholders.

Develop the EA Team

• Coach and mentor members of the EA team.
• Ensures the core EA team works closely with extended EA team members across the organization. Plans and manages a talent pool of domain architects that works with EA and non-EA related disciplines to deliver the goals, objectives and outcomes of the organization.
• Recruits and develops the critical skills, competencies and career paths for the EA team members; in particular, building the business and behavioral competencies needed to support delivery of EA’s services.

Design the EA Operating Mode

• Identifies organizational requirements for the resources, structures and cultural changes necessary to support agility and adaptability.
• Determines the extent to which the EA program has decision-making (governance) and compliance (assurance) rights. Ensures the role of EA in the project and product governance setting is one of guidance, advice and oversight.
• Helps the enterprise find the right balance between enterprise risk and agility. Communicates key EA positions to business and IT leaders to get buy-in and mandate.

Formulate Strategy and Guide Execution
Work with Business and Leadership Stakeholders to Develop Strategy

• Uses planning-driven, design-driven and learning-driven approaches to construct future- and current-state business models.
• Understands disruptive forces and the business’s economic and financial levers that are susceptible to digital transformation to effectively guide investment decisions.
• Leads the analysis of business and operating models, market trends and the technology industry to determine their potential impact on the enterprise’s business strategy, direction, and architecture.

Connect Strategy to Execution

• Constructs technology-enabled business and operating models and provides viable options and visibility into execution issues.
• Translates and executes business strategy to achieve the organization’s targeted business outcomes by leading the development of an implementation roadmap for the enterprise architecture.
• Facilitates business and IT alignment through a collaborative, supportive and consultative manner, driving the organization’s digital business strategies and balancing innovation and growth.

Facilitate Innovation
Collect, Analyze, Review and Refine Innovations, Trends, Disruptions, Opportunities, or Ideas

• Scans emerging technologies and the business ecosystem for major disruptive technology and non-technology trends (trendspotting) that affect business. Provides practical advice and best practices to take advantage of new, or emerging, opportunities and successfully deliver the expected business outcomes.
• Contextualizes technology trends based on social, economic, political and other non-technology trends.
• Assesses disruptive forces impacting the organization and identifies technology-enabled innovation opportunities that enables business strategy.

Develop, Track and Manage Execution of Innovations, Trends, Disruptions, Opportunities, or Ideas

• Details potential competitive threats that are generally considered outside of your traditional realm of competition.
• Runs technology experiments to create new products and services and integrate the best of these into steady-state operations for the organization.
• Tracks and applies innovative technologies, anchoring them in the business and operating model to assess their potential, and uses agile and lean approaches to evolve and manage innovation.

Build and Maintain Relationships
Build the EA Value Proposition and Structure Business Engagement

• Builds the EA practice to become an internal management consultancy, offering services and skills to support the development and execution of business strategy.
• Develops a portfolio of consulting services, designed to meet business and stakeholder needs, and delivers in an agile and time-boxed way.
• Determines 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

• Leads and facilitates interaction with business leaders, product managers and product owners in a business-driven conversation over the risks and implications of the product decision to the line of business, business unit and greater enterprise.
• Leads a collaborative “guild” of architects and works with a strategic committee/board to resolve conflicts between product lines and enterprise business outcomes.
• Provides consultative advice to business leaders and organizational stakeholders who seek actionable recommendations to make investment decisions about the next business and operating model of their organization, using technology to make that change happen.

Plan and Manage the IT Portfolio
Support Portfolio Modernization and Develop Roadmaps

• Presents gap analyses 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.
• Leads the development of an implementation plan for the enterprise architecture, based on business requirements and the varying IT strategies for project-driven or product-driven delivery teams.
• Leads analysis of the IT environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement.

Support Solutions Delivery

• Facilitates a collaborative relationship across architecture community, product management and product delivery teams.
• Collaborates with delivery teams to ensure consistency with the enterprise architecture, as well as to leverage shared technologies, tools and processes that impact speed to value and time to market.
• Develops and applies standards and minimal viable architectures through the EA governance model, which is informed by the business strategy and corporate governance. Clarifies accountability and provides the focal point for agile, effective and efficient decision making.
• Collaborates with infrastructure teams to ensure consistency with the enterprise architecture, as well as to identify when it is necessary to modify the enterprise architecture.

Evaluate, support and plan for Merger and Acquisitions (M&A)

• Include M&A activities in the roadmap and enterprise architecture designs
• Engage with the business stakeholders to understand current and future M&A activities
• Develop a play book in conjunction with other IT leaders to support M&A
• Support the evaluation and planning of required work for M&A

Requirements And Qualifications

• Excellent written, verbal, communication and presentation skills with the ability to articulate new ideas and concepts to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Knowledge of all components of enterprise architecture, business and IT principles and processes.
• Balances the long-term (“big picture”) and short-term implications of individual decisions and organization goals.
• Additional background investigations or probes may be conducted as part of hiring process
• Strong consulting skills such as targeted communications, engagement management, stakeholder management and business development.
• 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.
• Ready to think, behave and act in an innovative consulting manner to drive the organization’s digital business strategies.
• Knowledge of business models, operating models, financial models, cost-benefit analysis, budgeting and risk management.
• Understands and speaks the language of the business.
• Strong leadership skills with exceptional soft and interpersonal skills, including teamwork, facilitation and negotiation.
• Estimates the financial impact of EA alternatives and applies multiple solutions to business problems.
• Understanding of the different types of agile principles, methodologies and frameworks, especially those designed to be scaled at the enterprise level.
• Ten or more years of 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
• Excellent analytical, planning and organizational skills.
• Understanding of existing, new and emerging technologies, and processing environments.
• Organizationally savvy, with situational and contextual intelligence of the political climate of the enterprise and how to navigate obstacles and politics.
• Rapidly comprehends the functions and capabilities of new technologies.
• Master’s or bachelor’s degree in business, computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, system analysis or a related field of study, or equivalent experience.
• Knowledge of business ecosystems, SaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), service-oriented architecture (SOA), APIs, open data, microservices, event-driven IT and predictive analytics.
• Familiarity with basic graphical modeling approaches, tools and model repositories.
• Minimum of 10 years of business experience in strategic and operations planning and/or business analysis.

Benefits of Employment: IKO recognizes that its success is due to the strength of its employees. A primary goal of IKO is to promote individual employee's sense of accomplishment and contribution so that employees enjoy their association with IKO. The Company invests in its employees so that they are the most knowledgeable in the industry, and undertakes great efforts to nurture loyalty to, and teamwork at, IKO. We are pleased to offer competitive compensation, health care, a progressive and challenging workplace and a commitment to teamwork and integrity.
Diversity and Equal Opportunity Employment: IKO Industries Ltd. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to diversity and inclusion and are pleased to consider all qualified applicants for employment without consideration to race, religion, creed, color, national origin, age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status or disability. IKO Industries Ltd. encourages and welcomes applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.