Working at the World Bank Group provides a unique opportunity to help client countries solve their greatest development challenges. The World Bank Group is one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries; a unique global partnership of five institutions dedicated to ending poverty on a livable planet.
With 189 member countries and more than 120 offices worldwide, the World Bank Group works with public and private partners, invests in groundbreaking projects and uses data, research, and technology to develop solutions to pressing global, regional and local challenges. For more information, please visit http://www.worldbank.org.
The organization has undertaken an ambitious exercise to revise its mandate, products and structure to adjust to the multiple, intertwined crises affecting the world today (see Evolution Roadmap), in the move to becoming a better Bank.
Business Unit Overview
The mission of the Information and Technology Solutions (ITS) Vice Presidential Unit (VPU) is to leverage information and technology as a force multiplier to accelerate, deepen, and sustain development impact. Their vision is to harness information and technology for a world free of poverty on a livable planet. For more information on ITS, check this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=VTFGffa1Y7w.
The World Bank Group (WBG) is seeking a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to join the Information Technology Solutions Unit. This role is responsible for driving technology-enabled innovation and delivering the digital technology backbone to enable the WBG to scale capabilities needed to achieve their mission of creating a world free of poverty on a livable planet.
In this role the person will lead, manage, and coach a global and diverse team of cross-functional resources to define technology strategy, modernize technology infrastructure and operations, and manage technology innovation across the WBG while fostering a culture of innovation, sustainability, and agility. This person will collaborate with other members of the ITS Management and Leadership teams to continually evolve the ITS organization and maximize the value of technology investments at the WBG.
This role stands at the center of business and technology and requires an experienced leader to fully leverage the force multiplier effect of technology on driving digital transformation and business value. This person will be a strategic visionary, collaborative leader, and change agent.
Duties & Responsibilities
The primary role and responsibility of the WBG Chief Technology Officer will be to:
Strategy & Business Engagement
•Build out the new CTO organization and establish working relationships with key business partners and stakeholders. Represent ITS on different institutional bodies and governing forums.
•Collaborate with the WBG CIO and ITS Management team and lead the co-creation, execution, and evolution of the ITS vision, mission, and adaptive strategy, ensuring alignment with WBG and business partner strategies.
•Collaborate with business stakeholders and corporate partners to develop and execute a multi-year strategy and roadmap for enterprise architecture, infrastructure, technology operations, and innovation that reduces technical debt and drives measurable value for the business in alignment with the broader ITS strategy and WBG objectives.
•Oversee creation, implementation, and management of business-led technology solutions ensuring adherence to defined governance practices and ITS policies and standards.
•Maintain a holistic understanding of the WBG’s business and identify opportunities to introduce or enhance technology solutions to accelerate delivery of business outcomes.
•Develop and execute relationship management plans, manage business partner and stakeholder relationships by conducting strategic level communications and interactions and translating business needs into achievable, sustainable, and innovative technology solutions.
•Be a trusted advisor for business partners and other stakeholders, driving strategic discussions and influencing decisions on technology selection, design, and use.
•As a champion for innovation and digital transformation, maintain deep understanding and knowledge of relevant business and technology trends, leading practices, and the WBG business to identify opportunities to deliver technology-driven business value.
Technology Architecture & Management
•Establish fully functioning Enterprise Architecture (EA) capability that is engaged with business and ITS stakeholders and focused on driving business value and reducing technical complexity. Develop roadmaps for priority platforms/solutions. Lead the program to develop, maintain, and govern EA across the WBG.
•Architect, build, and operate enterprise-wide technology components and services including infrastructure, networks, compute and storage on-premises and in the cloud, integration, and middleware services.
•Provide enterprise architecture services including knowledge and governance functions, impact analyses and architecture reviews, application architecture, solution blueprints, reference models, design patterns and solution guides, enterprise architecture repository.
•Define enterprise standards and guidelines for user experience design and management. Define and manage technology standards and policies, and drive adoption of standard development methods, approaches, and tools.
•Govern and execute technology change across all environments ensuring minimal disruption to existing products, services, and solutions.
•Design, execute, and operate service management capabilities and tools, service catalog, and service performance management and reporting framework.
•Monitor, measure, report, and review performance of infrastructure, network, and operations services and take corrective action as needed.
Innovation Culture
•Lead innovation and research and development (R&D) efforts to explore new technologies and evaluate their potential to scale WBG capabilities and accelerate digital transformation.
•Establish and manage an enterprise capability and platform that defines and manages the “WBG Way” to innovation including innovation playbooks, innovation lifecycle management, platform/tooling, community of practice, and innovation hubs.
•Continually assess and evaluate the impact of emerging technologies against strategic business needs and interpret business value for leadership team.
•Drive technology optimization by leading the adoption of standard ITS agile ways of working and tools, rationalizing application architectures, and consolidating platforms.
•Oversee innovation governance, hackathons, partnerships, as well as raise awareness across WBG on emerging technologies and promote skill building.
ITS Business Management
•Develop, manage, and report on investment plans and budgets, providing transparency into costs and value delivered for business stakeholders.
•Working across ITS, promotes the consolidation of platforms, applications and services across the WBG, reducing complexity, technical debt and recurring/fixed cost.
•Define, measure, and report on personal and organization’s Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), driving continuous improvement in effectiveness and efficiency, proactively taking corrective action as required.
•Serve as a point of escalation, review, and approval for issues and decisions in the department.
•Comprehensively drive lean process redesign for assigned areas, identifying value, visualizing processes on a value stream, optimizing flow by reducing waste and hand-offs, improving effectiveness and efficiency in a continuous improvement approach.
•Develop and manage a risk-based business-led IT framework and implement operating model and governance for enabling business-led IT solutions.
•Effectively manage and mitigate risks and ensure compliance with WBG and ITS policies, standards, procedures, and security requirements.
Within the first year, this leader will be specifically responsible for:
•Evaluate current capabilities, strategies, roadmaps and staff, providing an informed current state assessment and future state proposal within 120 days.
•Develop framework to aggressively apply automation and/or AI to development activities including requirements discovery, transaction tracing, process discovery, coding, retrofitting, testing, deployment, and complete pilot. Establish baseline and set KPI for automation.
•Complete lean process redesign for at least two critical operational processes, in partnership with business colleagues. Quantify improvements.
•Improve psychological safety in the unit.
•Materially increase the impact of the enterprise architecture function.
