HoD Digital Business Support Systems

Job Description

• Reporting to the Chapter Lead – Digital IT, the HoD Digital Business Support Systems will provide strategic planning, modernization leadership, and operations excellence for the Business Support Systems (BSS) domain. The role drives the end-to-end delivery of agile, AI-enabled BSS that enable customer acquisition, revenue management, and digital service evolution across Revenue Management, Value Added Services (VAS), Enterprise Integration, Contact Centre, Order Management, and Financial Reporting.
• The role holder champions the shift from monolithic legacy platforms to simplified, cost-efficient, cloud-native, AI-native, TMF Open API-compliant architectures; leads the transformation to intelligent, predictive CARE and digital self-service; and accelerates time-to-market through composable platforms, reusable templates, and centralized SRE. Working with the senior executive team, business leaders, and external partners, the role ensures systems and services are reliable, secure, scalable, and future-proof — delivering operational discipline, commercial enablement, and superior customer experience across the full lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• BSS Modernization & Platform Strategy – Lead the transformation from complex monolithic platforms to simplified, cost-efficient, cloud-native BSS. Define and execute the 3-year technical roadmap (LRP) ensuring TMF Open API compliance, AI-native architecture, and composable platform design. Own architecture standards for BSS, VAS, and integration platforms. Drive vendor selection, partnership strategy, and data governance.
• Intelligent CARE & Digital Customer Experience – Transform fragmented channel tools into digital-first, AI-driven self-service CARE platforms. Embed AI, automation, and agentic systems to execute customer events including predictive CARE. Enable converged customer care platforms (Customer 360 / MDM) and intelligent, insights-led GTM tooling for trade, retail, and marketing.
• Agile Delivery & Time-to-Market Acceleration – Shift from ticket-based waterfall delivery to composable modern platforms supporting weekly releases with automated regression and testing. Drive reusable artefacts built centrally and shared across Tribes. Reduce time-to-market by >30% through “build once — use many” templates. Ensure 100% delivery yield on all PI commitments.
• Centralized SRE & Operational Excellence – Establish and lead centralized Platform & SRE squads enabling 24/7 maintenance, predictive ops, and zero-touch operations for all business squads. Ensure >99.99% system availability and MTTR <30 minutes. Drive AIOps, business continuity planning, and operational excellence programmes.
• Financial, Governance & People Leadership – Manage departmental CAPEX (approx. KES 5B) and OPEX (approx. KES 2B) budgets with zero revenue leakage and zero overdue audit issues. Drive agile adoption, squad structure design, and chapter development. Ensure compliance with Safaricom policies and ISO standards.

Customer Obsession

• Deepen team connection to our customers and communities.
• Foster authentic relationships with customers and partners that build trust.
• Explicitly take customer-centric decisions and take personal ownership to achieve results.
• Simplify processes through digitalisation and promote a digital mindset and digital first customer experience.
• Stay focused on the big priorities, know when to make meaningful trade-offs and demonstrate brilliant execution.

Purpose

• Create an inspiring vision for your team to drive strategy and performance.
• Show ambition and courage, empowering others to go beyond the plan.
• Bold and challenge teams to reimagine how things are done.
• Prompt new thinking and ideas by asking “what if” questions.
• Use knowledge of the external environment (customers, partners, competition, external bodies) to identify and act on opportunities for growth at pace.

Innovation

• Create psychological safety so everyone can have an impact.
• Fuel innovative ideas from others and test them to enable growth.
• Explore successes and failures with curiosity and resilience; fearlessly recognizing lessons learned.
• Share your ongoing learning and personal purpose with others.
• Learn fast from digital adoption, using learnings to drive simplicity, scale and efficiency.

Collaboration

• Articulate your team’s role in making our strategy happen, prioritizing and aligning resources with current and future needs.
• Actively collaborate to break silos and hold your team accountable to do the same.
• Develop others to make the most of their talents and coach them to take ownership to get things done.
• Create an inclusive environment ensuring the safety and wellbeing of others.
• Live our Purpose and demonstrate the highest Standard of integrity.

Health and Safety

• Uphold the company code of conduct, policies and procedures, ensuring integrity and accountability in every aspect of your work.
• All employees have a responsibility to adhere to safety, health, and wellbeing policies, guidelines and procedures in all actions and decisions

Qualifications

• Degree in Information Services, BSc Computer Sciences, BSc Electrical Engineering (or similar tertiary qualification)
• Over 10 years management experience, in a technical delivery and operations domain.
• Experience leading Business Support Systems (Planning, Delivery and Operations)
• Knowledge of Billing and VAS products and services.
• Knowledge of Enterprise Integration
• Approving and monitoring of Departmental Opex and Capex budget (CAPEX – KES 5B and OPEX KES 2B)