Head: Business Intelligence and Analytics needed at Sanlam Group

What will you do?

• Continue to support a data-informed organization by delivering business information and insights through the application of reporting and advanced analytics solutions that ultimately enrich business decisions at all levels within the organization.
• Responsible for transforming the BI target operating model, architecture, and platform in accordance with the Glacier and Sanlam vision to ensure a sustainable competitive advantage. Ensuring that the data products and services continuously support the Glacier business and other Sanlam Life and Savings businesses.
• Additionally, this role represents the organization on various committees related to strategic projects, data, analytics and governance, driving initiatives that support overall business objectives and growth.

KEY OUTCOMES

• The following outcomes will be expected to be achieved by the Head of Business Intelligence and Analytics

Strategic contribution 

• Understand, implement, and support the Glacier business strategy.
• Identify how Business Intelligence can support strategic decisions and projects.
• Own and transform the Glacier BI and Analytics strategy.
• Drive, measure, and report on the progress of BI contributions to the business strategy to the Glacier Exco, Glacier Board, and other Sanlam Business Executive committees.
• Proactively identify and drive efficiency gains across the business by leveraging the full spectrum of business intelligence capabilities, from reporting to analytics.
• Represent Glacier on all Data, Digital, Business Intelligence, and other committees, seeking opportunities for collaboration on inter and intra-cluster projects and experiments.
• Provide input into and support Glacier strategic initiatives and special projects.
• Contribute to the Senior Management Forum and participate in joint sessions with the Glacier Exco.

Business and Decision Support

• Promote the ways in which BI can enhance and/or support business goals.
• Respond to all relevant BI requests from business.
• Take responsibility for the value generation from the investment in BI in collaboration with the business.
• Establish new ways of working in the business to make optimal use of information and insights. 
• Drive early phase activities to explore and evaluate opportunities. Lead, build, deploy and manage various descriptive, predictive and optimization analytics use cases and experiments.
• Develop and maintain a clear product vision and roadmap, ensuring the BI solutions align with business strategies and deliver value.
• Translate business needs into detailed user stories and technical requirements for the BI team.
• Stay informed about industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in BI to continuously innovate and improve the product.

KEY OUTCOMES

People & change management

• Fulfil line management responsibility for a few senior direct reports from diverging backgrounds.
• Manage diversity, performance and output delivery across various teams that range from internal Glacier teams, broader SGT data platform and other business units.
• Continue to build and optimise a skilled internal Glacier team to deliver BI and analytics services and products sustainably to the business.
• Communicate effectively across departments regarding the role of BI in business and actively drive adoption of BI solutions.
• Foster a strong data community between various business lines, act as a strong advocate of using data to enable strategy and work along with business/IT to identify problems and solve them creatively.
• Responsible for conducting awareness and training initiatives to create a measurable uplift in data literacy and self-serve analytics across Glacier.

Glacier BI Operating Model and Platform.

• Lead the establishment of a modern Glacier BI platform leveraging existing and emerging Group capabilities.
• The Glacier BI operating model and architecture needs to support both traditional reporting requirements as well as advanced analytics requirements to enhance business decisions, both operationally and strategically.
• Evolve the Glacier BI platform and team to continue to meet the changing needs of the business as it transforms itself to remain competitive in its chosen markets.

Glacier BI Project and Delivery Management

• Translate strategic focus areas into a business demand pipeline of BI workloads and experiments. 
• Oversee and steer the delivery of BI workloads and experiments, using an agile delivery methodology, in accordance with time and budgetary commitments.
• Responsible for implementing best practices, standards and guidelines ensuring that best solutions and designs are implemented in alignment with Glacier and the Sanlam Group’s business intelligence principals for effective consumption and use of all enterprise data assets.

BI Operations 

• Manage and oversee the service model and relevant service level agreements with Sanlam Group Technology Data Platform team.
• Manage the engagements with the Sanlam Group Technology teams to deliver its contracted services in line with the relevant service level agreements.
• Manage and oversee an appropriate budgeting and cost recovery model with Sanlam Group Technology and Sanlam Business Intelligence. 
• Manage and oversee financial commitment, appropriate budgeting and cost recovery model from businesses making use of the Glacier BI assets and services (like SanlamConnect). 
• Drive the continuous improvement of the BI platform and operational capability to facilitate optimal long-term total cost of ownership.
• Ensure that data management practices are in line with Statutory, Regulatory, Audit and Risk expectations.

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor’s degree preferred in a Mathematics, Computer Science, Business, Engineering or related field.
• 5 to 7 years relevant operational or project related experience in data, analysis and/or reporting. 
• 5 to 7 years in positions requiring executive level influence and personally operating at senior management level would be advantageous. History of presenting to Executives, Senior Managers and Heads from other clusters and business units as well as regulatory bodies and end clients would required.
• Experience of applying BI in a Wealth Management or Investment business context would be advantageous.
• Hands-on experience with leading teams in Business Analytics, data engineering, data modelling and data governance. 
• Sound knowledge of data modelling (Kimball Preferred) and statistics. Familiarity with analytics, statistical & visualization tools.
• Solid ability to examine large quantities of data, derive useful patterns, and turn that 
• observation into practical insights. 
• Able to work using a multitude of disparate data sources and tools; working out of a data warehouse or from smaller imperfect datasets. Comfortable working with at least one data querying language (SQL, SPARK, etc).
• Exposure to the following would be highly advantageous: SAP Hana, SAP Business Objects, Cloudera, Power BI, Snowflake, Python, SQL, Microsoft Excel and AWS. 

Competencies

• Strong business acumen and leadership capabilities
• Excellent communication and presentation skills in English and ability to concisely deliver recommendations & proposals
• Comfortable communicating with peers, business stakeholders and non-analytics audiences
• Strategic Mind-set: Forward looking and ability to identify future possibilities and translating them into breakthrough strategies.

What will make you successful in this role?

Qualification and Experience

• BSc (Maths, Statistics and Actuarial Science) with 6 to 8 years related experience.