Chief Enterprise Architect

Chief Enterprise Architect, Information Technology

Reports to: Vice President, IT Strategy and Transformation Role Type: Executive Leadership Location: Deerfield, IL

Role Purpose The Chief Enterprise Architect (CEA) is the senior Information Technology (IT) leader accountable for translating enterprise strategy into coherent, executable business and technology outcomes. The role ensures that technology strategy, technology evolution roadmaps, and technology selections are actively governed to enable the company's customer experience, growth, productivity, compliance, security, operational simplification, capital allocation, and cost optimization goals.

Outcomes That Define Success Success for the CEA is demonstrated by:

• Clear alignment between enterprise strategy and information technology strategy
• Formal management of 5-year technology evolution roadmaps, refreshed annually
• Simplification of the technology landscape, optimizing business processes, minimizing cost, and maximizing leverage of capabilities across the enterprise
• Reduced architectural complexity, technical debt, and IT operating cost
• A credible, high‐performing, outcome-oriented architecture community actively engaged in executing the technology evolution roadmaps

Core Responsibilities People: Lead the IT Architecture Community

• Lead the architecture community with a clear mission and governance model, and nurture the community to advance business and technology acumen
• Establish architectural principles that emphasize enterprise-wide leverage, process and technology simplification, speed of execution, sound risk management, and revealing conditions for which specialized technological solutions are needed
• Ensure the members of the architecture community operate in a fashion that defines and manages precise architectural standards while also actively engaging in efforts to architect and deploy optimal solutions

Strategy Realization: Shape Architectural Technology Strategy and Drive Execution

• Partner with the CIO and executive leaders to translate strategy into target operating models, capability roadmaps, and investment priorities
• Lead future‐state architecture across business capabilities, value streams, platforms, and ecosystems
• Connect strategy to execution through implementable, sequenced roadmaps
• Provide fact‐based guidance on readiness, trade‐offs, and change capacity
• Sponsor annual refreshes of the Process-IT Landscape for the entire enterprise, covering all business functions and business divisions
• Champion establishment and annual refreshes of a rolling 5-year Process-IT Target State Landscape to guide continuous evolution toward a simpler, more cost-effective, and capable technology ecosystem
• Act as the integrator across business units, product teams, and technology domains to continually manage understanding of the Current State Process-IT Landscape and guide decisions that result in progressing to the Target State Landscape.
• Ensure alignment between:
• Business capabilities and value streams
• Product portfolios and platform strategies
• Technology standards and delivery autonomy
• Surface cross‐enterprise dependencies, risks, and opportunities early
• Enable consistent architectural decision‐making without slowing delivery

Governance: Drive Technology Selections and Innovation

• Identify and contextualize emerging technologies and ecosystem trends
• Sponsor the Technical Assessment Council (TAC) to validate, assess, and disposition new technology requests ensuring use of existing technologies is first priority
• Review and validate proposed solution designs described in IT investment proposals
• Ensure architectural target state guidelines enable re-use and rapid deployment
• Lead assessments of architectural health, technical debt, and technology modernization priorities
• Champion the continuous improvement of the CMDB ensuring accuracy, clarity, and completeness throughout the knowledge base
• Sponsor targeted experiments tied to tangible business outcomes
• Ensure successful innovations scale into operational capabilities
• Engage the architecture community to produce architectural designs for proposed IT investments leveraging existing technologies to the greatest extent possible across the enterprise, and utilizing new technologies only to address business-critical capability gaps
• Partner with delivery and infrastructure leaders to improve cost efficiency and time‐to‐market

Executive Relationships The CEA serves as a trusted advisor to:

• CIO and IT leadership
• Business Division and Functional leaders
• Finance, Strategy, and Transformation leaders

The role requires executive‐level influence and the ability to challenge constructively in guiding technology strategies and selections to maximize enterprise leverage of capabilities and minimize operating cost.

Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in IT or Engineering; or equivalent experience
• 15+ years in enterprise architecture, IT strategy, and business transformation
• Track record in executing multi-year technology evolution roadmaps yielding tangible business outcomes
• Global IT community leadership in delivering technology-powered business transformations in complex environments

Critical Capabilities

• Business and IT architectural design
• Technology evolution roadmap planning and business case development
• Technology trends assessment and application (cloud, SaaS, platforms, data, AI)
• Executive communication and facilitation

Leadership Profile

• Enterprise‐first, outcome‐driven mindset
• Credible and persuasive with senior executives
• Systems thinker balancing long‐term integrity with near‐term delivery
• Pragmatic, commercially grounded, and politically astute
• Builder of talent, trust, and cross‐functional alignment

CIO Perspective The Chief Enterprise Architect ensures we invest in the right technologies, design architectures coherently, and evolve the IT landscape to maximize enterprise leverage, minimize cost, and keep pace with technological trends that enable competitive advantage.