General Manager: Cloud Centre of Excellence at MTN

Mission/ Core purpose of the Job

The General Manager – Cloud Centre of Excellence is responsible to continue developing MTN’s Cloud Centre of Excellence and for the design, development, implementation, and management of cloud technology across MTN. The role is responsible for delivering all aspects related to MTN’s Transformation to the adoption of Cloud technologies and realisation of cloud enabled business models across MTN’s markets through technology leadership and collaboration with the relevant stakeholders in order to enable growth, achieve sustainability and unlock value for MTN both in terms of TCO reduction as well as business enablement. 

Key Performance Areas: Core, essential responsibilities / outputs of the position (KPA's)

The General Manager: Cloud Centre of Excellence will be accountable to achieve the following objectives:

• Continue developing and managing the Cloud Centre of Excellence and liaise with its stakeholders to drive thought leadership, strategy and execution towards value realisation (estimated opportunity value is multi-billion ZAR)
• Present to Group Operating Committee, Group ExCo and other similar forums as needed
• Evolve the cloud strategy aligned to the outcomes defined in the overall GCTIO strategy and the business goals of GCOO, Group Digital, EBU and other business stakeholders for cloud and data centre strategy
• Define and run governance for Manco and OpCos for all cloud related projects
• Evolve the cloud reference architecture, technical standards, service catalogue and value realisation framework incl the business cases related to cloud adoption projects in Group and OpCos
• Continuously develop the CCOE service portfolio and roadmap strategy in alignment with wider enterprise architecture roadmaps
• Drive the delivery of cloud native technology projects using standard methodologies (e.g. SAFe / DevOps) with security by design
• Manage the value realisation office within the CCoE to plan investments and budget allocation to maximise value creation and minimise time to value from cloud related initiatives (across Manco and OpCos) and provide input to CapEx and OpEx budget guidelines to OpCos in the annual budget cycle
• Continuously monitor and optimise public cloud and on-prem infrastructure spend across multi[1]cloud environments
• Ensure cloud offering and architecture is aligned to industry best practices and CCOE standards
• Facilitate compliance to Telco Cloud reference bodies such as ETSI, GSMA, 3GPP & ITU (in collaboration with the network strategy team).
• Work with PMO management to ensure effective project management of Cloud specific requirements (particularly relating to availability, accessibility, and retention) • Vendor management focused on the strategic partners (together with GSSC)
• Collaborate with network technology team towards setting up and operating the Telco Test lab for verification/validation/certification of Telco VNF/CNFs configuration
• Foster innovation management in collaboration with the Hyperscaler partner(s)
• People management of CCOE teams providing mentorship, motivation and vision to harness potential and deliver results
• Pursue opportunities to present MTN’s approach and achievements to regional and global events and publications.

Key Deliverables

• Cloud strategy for Manco and OpCos including deployment, planning and readiness assessment
• Cloud roadmap and implementation management throughout the Group
• Cloud adoption business case framework and Business cases for workload migration
• Cloud reference architecture for IT and Network workloads (incl public cloud migrations as well as cloud native technology adoption in hybrid cloud scenarios)
• Cloud technology standards and reference designs (incl security)
• Cloud Governance framework, including
• Value Realisation framework and tracking
• Cloud Architecture Review Board o New policies or existing policy updates
• Reporting
• Hyperscaler(s) partner management
• Cloud Operations Management Framework and SLA/OLA/WLA for cloud service management and continuous improvement initiatives
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) and critical success factors related to the execution of the Cloud strategy across Manco and OpCos
• Cloud COE budget management
• Cloud Service Catalogue and associated charging model for OpCos
• Cloud COE initiated or supported innovation
• Cloud Test Lab design and delivery.

Role Dependencies

• Active support from the Executive: IT Design & Delivery
• Deep understanding of the MTN business strategy
• Understanding of the Opco technology, business and regulatory context
• Timely decision making and reporting
• Alignment of OpCo and Group strategy initiatives.

Job Requirements
Education:

• Minimum 4-year relevant Academic Degree with Honours (B Eng / BSc Degree Preferred)
• MBA / Masters advantageous
• English (French and/or Arabic advantageous)
• Relevant certification/accreditation/membership with professional body as required for role (Architect level certification of a public cloud provider.)

Experience

• Minimum 5 years of Senior Management Experience
• Minimum 10 years’ experience in IT roles with proven experience in cloud technology leadership roles
• Expertise and similar experiences on governance and processes in a CCOE or equivalent structure related to Cloud Strategy and Architecture for IT and Telco workloads
• Minimum 3 years participating in proof of concept, implementation and operations of public cloud infrastructure and topologies migrating applications from the enterprise to public cloud providers
• Experience helping development teams build and deploy microservices based applications in the public cloud with Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tools and processes such as Jenkins.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Open Shift, Docker Enterprise or Cloud Foundry in the public cloud and other Container Orchestration platforms
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code automation tools/platforms (e.g., AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack) and software configuration and release management tools such as GitHub
• Experience in Structured and unstructured databases and usage patterns (e.g., Big Data) and Analytics
• API experience with APIgee or other API exposure platforms. – Understanding of Identity and Access Management, user and system authentication methods and certificates, tokens and certificate management.
• Experience with architecting, designing, implementing, or operating IT/Telco systems on leading commercial cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP
• Experience with large and complex IT /NW systems in an enterprise environment using virtualization or private Cloud technologies, including VMware, Xen, OpenStack, and Hyper-V

Competencies

• Business Acumen, Problem Solving, Information processing, Influencing others
• Data interpretation, Judgement, Continuous improvement, Reporting
• Get it done, Communication, Innovative, Agile, Accountable