Core Purpose:
The core purpose/mission of this job is to create workable system wide network solution architectures and designs for the mobile services meeting business and technical requirements. This is particular to all Customer Relation Management Systems (CRM, POS, Credit Vetting) integrating into Billing applications, VAS, Self Service, Portal, Call Centre and Business information systems solutions. One must work on the development of applications and perform capacity planning of services in line with business requirements and budgetary priorities within IT Delivery Area. One defines, plans, architects and implements Business and IS requirements with vendors and MTN Operations for various systems and provides technical leadership.
Key Performance Areas: Core, essential responsibilities / outputs of the position (KPA's):
Tactical Plannings and Operations
• Provide system consultation for all applications related projects so that decisions can be made as to the most appropriate delivery methodology
• Ensure delivery of (authorised) projects according to the prioritised project list
• Ensure the one performs the necessary analysis, design, modelling and documentation tasks necessary to pass IS governance forums
• Ensure that vendors (whether they do development or system configuration) are correctly driven and that in-house business and resultant functional logic is maintained within the company through the supply of fully fledged and detailed specifications and ensure that vendors are driven to fulfil these and supply a an end result that meets any IS quality standards
• Ensure professional system documentation is up to date at all times
• Provide input into the design of technology solution architectures with a 2 to 5 year horizon. Focus for both converging IT, Telco technologies and future ICT requirements
• Assist in the evaluation of new technologies and products to determine feasibility and desirability of incorporating their capabilities into the Company’s IS systems
• Capacity Upgrades that are required due to Network Traffic
• Software Upgrades required to ensure adherence to maintenance agreements
• Assess and mitigate Security Vulnerabilities on the CRM Applications
• Aspects of a system that have not been performing optimally that require changes to architecture
• Hardware that is reaching end of life and requires replacement
• Project manage single domain projects or change requests
• Manage vendors development capacity and ensuring utilisation aligns to Vendor MSA/Development contract
System Ownership
• One is allocated a set of systems for which you have the primary responsibility and a set of systems for you have a secondary responsibility
• Although a lot of project focus would be on primary CRM systems (Siebel, Siebel RODOD, Provenir – Vetting Decisioning Engine, Biometric applications, POS), one is required to do project work on secondary systems to ensure balance and continuity
• Any system within the IT Delivery space can be allocated and one will be expected to take up many new challenges
• Owning the Roadmap of assigned applications including, Business as usual projects (BAU), Vendor/OEM application roadmaps
Stakeholders
• Interface with internal and external industry experts to anticipate customer needs and facilitate solutions development.
• Collaborate across functional teams within the Broader team to enable the development of solutions necessary to drive the desired business outcomes for customers.
• Manage the applicable application vendors/OEMs
Governance and Risk Management
• Participate in the creation and implementation of functional policies, standard operating procedures and best practices that ensure operational efficiency, accuracy, security, integrity and compliance with relevant laws and regulations.
• Highlight any risks to senior manager to enable fast mitigation of these risks.
• Ensure that changes to the current environment follow Change Board procedures; are properly documented and tested before promoting into production. Post production changes should be documented and managed.
• Support the prioritisation process to drive prioritisation of requirements and initiatives in functional areas to ensure timeous delivery of requirements
• Support Revenue Assurance functions to understand issues and resolve any revenue issues or leakage
• Create visibility of changes to core systems, data and products by informing the organisation of changes
• Support assessment of Portfolio maturity on an annual basis
• Influence and implement aspects of data security policies
• Support the creation of critical Policies, Processes or Procedure such that Business risk is managed which also ensures that any ISO certifications can be maintained and ensure that they are being utilised in day to day operations.
Job Requirements (Education, Experience and Competencies):
Education:
• Minimum 3 year Degree or Diploma in Information Systems or Engineering (Bsc IT, Bcom IT, Diploma IT)
• Togaf certification
Experience:
• Minimum of 2-5 years’ experience in Telco CRM
• Experience in supervising/managing others (vendors)
• Experience in Agile Development and DevOps
• Development or technical lead experience with functional knowledge of the newest technologies and trends
• Some solid background in programming (e.g. Java, Python, Perl, PHP, C/C++, C#, VB.Net, Sql, etc) is mandatory
• Good understanding of as many Telco and IT protocols as possible such as (but not limited to) SS7, POP & SMTP, Diameter, FTP, SNMP, LDAP, HTTP, XML/RPC, SSL, SIP, H.323, SGCP, MGCP, RTP, Voice & Video codes (G7.X etc), IMAP, SOAP, WML, MM7, SMPP, XML, XHTML etc
• Enterprise Product catalogue, commercial catalogue
• System Architecture & Design Skills including: Activity Diagrams, Business Requirements Gathering and Feedback, Capacity Upgrade Planning, Deployment & Testing Planning, Flowcharting, Interaction Diagramming (Sequence), State Machine Diagramming, System Topology Diagrams and Data flow diagramming, Systems Requirement Specifications, Use Case Diagramming
• IP technology