Job Description

To establish, lead, and continuously enhance the Data Management & Analytics Centre of Excellence, driving the development and execution of enterprise-wide data governance, management, and analytics strategies.
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Role Purpose
To establish, lead, and continuously enhance the Data Management & Analytics Centre of Excellence, driving the development and execution of enterprise-wide data governance, management, and analytics strategies.
Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in data science, Statistics, Actuarial Science, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field (Master's preferred).
• At least 8+ years of experience in data, analytics, or technology roles within banking, telecommunications, or insurance.
• At least 3 years in a leadership capacity.
• Demonstrated success in bridging business and technology for enterprise-wide data delivery.
• Strong technical expertise in Azure Synapse, SQL, and data integration, Metadata and Master Data Management platforms.
• Proven track record in executing analytics use cases .
• In-depth knowledge of South African data governance and compliance.

Duties & Responsibilities
Strategic data leadership

• Lead the implementation of the enterprise data and analytics strategy aligned with business priorities, ensuring delivery of measurable business value.
• Champion data governance, management, and quality initiatives, ensuring compliance with South African regulatory requirements.
• Act as a liaison between business units and technology teams, translating business priorities into scalable, governed, and reusable data and analytics solutions.
• Foster and embed a data-driven culture throughout Guardrisk, driving consistent data practices across all business units.

Data Management & Architecture

• Define and enforce standardised data input formats, source specifications, and data ingestion processes within the Guardrisk ecosystem.
• Maintain and enrich a comprehensive data catalog with clear metadata, lineage, and ownership for transparency and traceability.
• Align cross-functional units on common logic, definitions, joins, and KPIs to ensure enterprise-wide data consistency.
• Continuously monitor data quality metrics, driving remediation efforts and maintaining trust and compliance.
• Lead data governance bodies such as Data Council and Data SteerCos to oversee data governance frameworks.

Use Case Execution for Support Functions

• Develop, operationalise, and oversee analytics use cases for support functions (Finance, Risk, HR, Compliance, Actuarial), particularly where dedicated data teams are absent.
• Integrate trusted datasets and analytics outputs into day-to-day business processes to enable informed decision-making.
• Enforce guardrails to ensure all analytics initiatives adhere to governance and compliance standards.
• Provide technical guidance to internal analytics teams, ensuring alignment with central data architecture and standards.

Data Governance and compliance

• Drive enterprise-wide adoption of central data definitions and datasets, promoting reuse and knowledge sharing.
• Define and enforce data retention, archiving, and lifecycle management policies per regulatory requirements.
• Lead initiatives to enhance metadata management, lineage tracking, and data quality assurance.
• Serve as executive sponsor for data privacy and ethics programs, ensuring lawful and ethical data usage

Technology and IT Partnership

• Collaborate closely with IT leadership to design and maintain data pipelines, storage, and infrastructure that meet business needs.
• Influence IT investments, ensuring data architecture and toolsets are flexible, scalable, and compliant to effectively enable execution of the Data strategy across the enterprise.
• Build and maintain the data pipelines and infrastructure that allows for analytics use case execution

People Leadership

• Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing operations team to achieve strategic and operational objectives.
• Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, and performance.
• Manage capacity, talent development, and succession planning within the operations function

Competencies

• Developing strategies: Is focused on developing strategies; thinks in the longer term and anticipates trends; envisages the future and adopts a visionary approach.
• Providing insights : Is focused on continuously improving things; provides insights by identifying key issues; makes intuitive judgements.
• Upholding standards : Behaves ethically and justly; is discreet and maintains confidentiality; meets commitments by acting with integrity.
• Articulating information: Is articulate in giving presentations; is eloquent and explains things well; projects social confidence when articulating information.
• Directing people: Is comfortable leading people; coordinates and directs groups; seeks to control things.
• Making decisions: Is determined and decides on actions; willingly assumes responsibility; is definitive and stands by own decisions.