About Us
SMS Plc are leaders in the smart energy revolution, fitting over a million properties with smart meters and counting. At the heart of the UK energy market for over two decades, we play a critical role in transforming and decarbonising the UK energy system.
We are proud of being both an equal opportunity employer and an accredited real living wage employer! We look out for our customers and our focus is ‘putting our people first’.
Our people enable us to do all of this by living our 5 core values: Safety, Customer excellence, Sustainability, Innovation and Pride
The Role
The Senior Enterprise Data Architect (SEDA) is responsible for setting enterprise data architecture roadmaps and reference architectures as well as governing against these directions.
As part of the Enterprise Architecture team you will engage at a strategic level, influencing policy, and setting direction for technical and business change. You will play a key role in ensuring that SMS develops and maintains a strong IT Architecture capability.
Key Responsibilities
- Working within our Enterprise Architecture team, you will be responsible for:
- Working across the organisation at a strategic level to translate the business strategy and requirements into business and digital change.
- Defining our data strategy and roadmaps, aligning them with business strategies and requirements and obtaining senior stakeholder consensus.
- You will support and contribute to solution designs both as a subject matter specialist and from a strategic point of view.
- Provide oversight and advice to other data architects who are undertaking the design of data models and support the management of data artefacts.
- Work with technical architects to make sure that an organisation’s systems are designed in accordance with the appropriate data architecture.
Education and Professional Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree in computer science or relevant field from an accredited college or university; Master’s degree from an accredited college or university preferred (or equivalent)
Desirable memberships
- DAMA's Certified Data Management Professional (CDMP)
- Data Governance and Stewardship Professional (DGSP)
- The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF)
Skills and Knowledge
Essential Experience
- A broad IT and Enterprise Architecture (EA) background. With experience in architecting enterprise scale applications or architecture roles where you will have gained experience in embedding data architecture capabilities.
- Communication skills (data). You can listen to the needs of technical and business stakeholders and interpret them. You can manage stakeholder expectations and be flexible. You know how to manage proactive and reactive communication. You can facilitate difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders.
- Data analysis and synthesis. You can undertake data profiling and source system analysis. You can present clear insights to colleagues to support the end use of the data.
- Data communication. You understand the appropriate mediums to communicate findings; you can shape communications for the audience.
- Data governance. You can evolve and define data governance and take responsibility for collaborating and supporting in wider governance. You know how to assure and integrate data services to meet the needs of multiple business services. You work proactively to ensure the organisation designs architecture that considers data.
- Data innovation. You understand the impact of emerging trends on the organisation in data tools, analysis techniques and data usage.
- Data modelling. You understand the concepts and principles of data modelling and can produce relevant data models across multiple subject areas. You know how to reverse-engineer data models from a live system. You understand industry recognised data modelling patterns and standards and know when to apply them. You can compare and align different data models.
- Data standards. You can develop and set data standards across multiple subject areas establishing architectural principles, policies, and reference architectures. With experience of driving adoption, re-use and standardisation.
- Metadata management. You can design an appropriate metadata repository and present changes to existing metadata repositories. You understand a range of tools for storing and working with metadata. You can provide oversight and advice to more inexperienced members of the team.
- Problem resolution (data). You can ensure that the most appropriate actions are taken to resolve problems as they occur. You coordinate teams to resolve problems and implement solutions and preventative measures.
- Strategic thinking (data architecture). You work within a strategic context and communicate how activities meet strategic goals. Developing strategies and roadmaps from a business and technology perspective, including ‘as-is’, ‘to-be’ and transitional states.
- Turning business problems into data design. You can design data architecture by dealing with problems that span different business areas. You can draw links between problems in order to reach common solutions. You can work across multiple subject areas, a single large or complicated subject area.
Desirable Experience
- Experience of developing data architecture capabilities for operational and analytical systems. Understanding of the data lifecycle and implications for GDPR.
Personal Attributes
- Manages own workload effectively.
- Supervises and plans team workload.
- The ability to manage multiple teams across sites showing excellent communication skills.
- The ability to build and maintain customer relationships to ensure customers delighted and future growth opportunities.
- Demonstrable approach to self-development.
- Curious about new ideas and able to translate them into viable plans.
- Resilient and responsive to change.
- Strong situational judgement and risk management skills.
- Shows pride through maintenance of tools and vehicle appearance.
- Contributes to team development through sharing expertise.
- Equipped to hit the ground running and deliver results at pace, while maintaining poise.
- Positively influence a wide range of stakeholders under a variety of budgetary and regulatory pressures.
In Return
We support Mental, Physical and Financial wellbeing, and we're proud of our benefits package to reward great talent which includes:
- 25 personal holiday days per year with additional allocation of 8 public holidays (includes options to buy and sell)
- After 5 years’ service, you will be rewarded with an additional 5 days annual leave increasing your total to 30 personal days and 8 public holidays.
Smart Health
Keeping our employees mentally and physically healthy is one of the things that matters most to us.
- Employee Assistance Programme (free access to counselling & support) with easy access via My Healthy Advantage app.
- Access to SmartHealth app - includes a free 24/7 online GP and a range of wellbeing services.
- Cycle Scheme - lower your carbon footprint whilst staying healthy.
Smart Savings
- Eligibility to join our Share Incentive Plan following 6 months employment
- Life Insurance cover where your next of kin will receive 4 times your annual salary
- Refer a friend bonus (£500)
- Corporate season ticket travel
- Length of service cash incentive
- Automatic enrolment into the Company Stakeholder Pension Scheme following 3 months employment.
The future looks bright
Your development is important to us - we support and encourage development including internal and external accredited courses, study support and E-Learning and internal promotion.