Head of Strategy, Business Engagement and Change

Job Summary

The Head of Strategy, Business Engagement and Change directly enables the CDAIO to fulfil its mandate: to manage, steward, and activate the organisation's data and AI capabilities to deliver measurable business value by leading the strategic design, business engagement, and change execution capabilities of the CDAIO. The role must orchestrate delivery across all CDAIO capabilities to ensure the function's strategy is coherent, its priorities are visible, its governance is decision-led, and its outcomes are measurable and communicated with board-grade clarity. This role serves as the CDAIO's primary force for translating strategy into enterprise-wide adoption and behavioural change, through relational authority, leveraging influence, narrative, and governance design as its core tools of execution.

The role is a key in interfacing with business domain executives, translating the CDAIO mandate into business-relevant language, championing business needs within the CDAIO, and ensuring that data and AI investments are prioritised, communicated, and valued in terms the business recognises.

KEY FOCUS AREAS 

• Enterprise Strategy Ownership: Own the CDAIO's overarching strategy, including its formulation, evolution, communication, and alignment to Absa Group's broader strategic agenda. 

• Business Engagement and Needs Championing: Serve as the primary interface between the CDAIO and Absa's business domain executives, translating business needs into CDAIO delivery priorities and communicating CDAIO outputs in business value terms. 

• Change Framework Design and Governance: Design, implement, and maintain the CDAIO's strategic change frameworks against global best practice, owning the institutional change capability of the function, not just individual change programmes. 

• Governance Effectiveness: Transform CDAIO governance forums from reporting mechanisms into decision-led bodies, with defined decision rights, escalation paths, and action accountability that accelerate prioritisation and follow-through. 

• Portfolio Value Identification and Communication: Define, measure, evidence, and communicate the expected and realised benefits of the CDAIO's full portfolio; producing the value measurement tool and narrative that the business and the board require. 

• Programme Prioritisation and Capacity: Operate the CDAIO's intake-to-delivery workflow; evaluating, sequencing, and rebalancing portfolio demand based on strategic alignment, value, risk, and capacity constraints. 

• Enterprise Embedment and Training: Own the design of the CDAIO's Embedment and Training Framework, ensuring commonality, minimum standards, and measurable adoption outcomes across all CDAIO-led capability development initiatives. 

• Horizon Scanning and Strategic Intelligence: Monitor the external data and AI transformation landscape and translate competitive intelligence into CDAIO strategy and roadmap input

ACCOUNTABILITIES 

 

Strategy Formulation and Execution 

• Define and own the CDAIO's overarching strategy with bold, bank-wide ambition and clear financial and operational outcomes tied to specific milestones and business domain commitments. 

• Engage the leadership team to translate the CDAIO strategic objectives into coordinated initiative portfolios across all the main capabilities, setting direction, allocating strategic focus, and ensuring coherence across the function. This must be conducted in a manner that ensures clear demarcation of initiative portfolio ownership and delivery sequencing which sit with the head of the capability.  

• Integrate delivery across business needs, influence the function's design, set tone and context for others, and develop tactics to implement controlled changes to CDAIO practices (cross-functional), operationalising the CDAIO strategic intent into how work actually gets done. 

• Monitor and analyse industry trends and leading practices in data and AI transformation, engaging with peer institutions, academic bodies, and technology innovators to ensure the CDAIO's strategy remains at the frontier of responsible and value-creating data and AI practice in local and Pan-African banking. 

• Represent the CDAIO's strategic agenda at Group Exco, board committees, and governance forums (when required), producing board-grade reporting, investment submissions, and strategy papers that meet Absa's quality standard for board-level communication. 

• Track execution progress against key strategic initiatives across all CDAIO capabilities at CDAIO portfolio level, identify deviations from plan, surface risks and intervene to correct course without waiting for escalation. 

 

Business Engagement and Stakeholder Orchestration 

• Design and operate a structured stakeholder engagement model that gives business domain executives across the business units (CIB, PPB, BB and AR),  risk, compliance, and support functions consistent, predictable visibility of CDAIO priorities, decisions, and progress. 

• Champion the needs of the business within the CDAIO, ensuring that data and AI investments are anchored in real business problems and that business domain leaders are active co-owners of their data and AI agendas, not passive recipients of CDAIO outputs. 

• Create and maintain the single, consistent CDAIO narrative setting out the 'what's in / what's out / what's next (and why)' story that senior business stakeholders require to engage meaningfully with the CDAIO's agenda and to allocate their own organisational resources in support of it. 

• Design and run the CDAIO's external stakeholder engagement rhythm including executive briefings, steering committees, domain-level forums, and the councils ensuring these forums are decision-led, not reporting-led. 

• Develop a transparent, intelligible prioritisation framework that communicates why one business area or initiative is sequenced ahead of another. 

• Manage relationships with key external partners, technology vendors, academic institutions, and peer-bank networks to support the CDAIO's horizon scanning and benchmarking agenda. 

Change Framework Design, Implementation, and Governance 

• Design, implement, and maintain the CDAIO's strategic change frameworks against global best practice such as ADKAR (Prosci), the ACMP CCMP standard, and Kotter's change model. This is a formal accountability, not advisory support as this role owns the institutional change capability of the CDAIO function. 

• Ensure every major CDAIO capability release, platform launch, or governance change is accompanied by a structured change plan with defined adoption milestones, stakeholder engagement design, and measurement of behavioural change. 

• Engage the CDAIO leadership team to co-design the enterprise-wide data and AI literacy programme and lead the execution of thereof, enabling business users, executives, and board members to engage with data and AI outputs intelligently and make informed decisions about data and AI investments. Connect literacy programmes through the likes of a shared curriculum governance process. 

• Monitor adoption outcomes and intervene when embedment is stalling; diagnosing whether the barrier is awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, or reinforcement and designing targeted interventions at the appropriate stage. 

• Build distributed change leadership capacity across business domain sponsors and CDAIO capability leads, ensuring that change is not dependent on a single central function but embedded in how the organisation operates. 

• Own the Embedment and Training Framework; design the minimum standards, templates, and orchestration mechanisms that ensure consistency and quality across all CDAIO-led training and capability development initiatives across the enterprise. 

 

Portfolio Value Identification and Governance 

• Own the Programme Value Identification capability. Define, measure, evidence, and communicate the expected and realised benefits of the full CDAIO portfolio. 

• Establish and maintain the intake-to-delivery workflow for the CDAIO, with clear handoffs, RACI by work type, intake triage, and Programme Prioritisation forums that sequence demand based on strategic alignment, value, risk, and capacity constraints. Solicit formal input from the CDAIO leadership team.  

• Transform CDAIO governance forums into decision-led bodies. Define decision types, required inputs, decision authorities, escalation paths, and action tracking that ensures follow-through and accountability across the function.  

• Report portfolio value to the CDAIO, Group Exco, and board on a regular cadence  with the transparency, narrative quality, and analytical rigour required to sustain executive confidence in the CDAIO's investment and to secure ongoing funding for the data and AI agenda. 

• Manage the strategic planning interface between the CDAIO and Absa Group's planning cycles ensuring the CDAIO's portfolio roadmap is reflected in the Group's strategic plan, investment submissions, and performance scorecards. 

 

Leading Talent 

•  Build and lead a high-performing, multidisciplinary Strategy, Business Engagement and Change function including Data Strategy Ownership, People Change and Culture, AI Leadership and Practitioner Strategy (enterprise level), and Chief of Staff capabilities. 

• Attract, develop, and retain top strategy, change management, and business engagement talent building a team culture that combines strategic rigour with practical delivery orientation, emotional intelligence, and deep banking domain knowledge. 

• Develop change leadership capability across CDAIO capability leads and business domain sponsors, building the distributed sponsorship infrastructure that sustains enterprise-level data and AI adoption over the long term. 

• Foster a culture of continuous improvement within the CDAIO, identifying structural inefficiencies in how the function operates, designing controlled changes to practices, and embedding better ways of working across the function. 

• Develop future strategy and change leaders through mentorship, stretch assignments, and tailored development experiences; building the pipeline the CDAIO will need as its mandate grows. 

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE 

 

Education/ Qualification: 
 

• Academic: Postgraduate degree (Masters) in Strategy, Business Administration, Organisational Development, Information Management, or an equivalent discipline. An MBA from a triple crowned institution is strongly preferred at this grade, given the commercial acumen, stakeholder leadership, and strategic planning capabilities the role demands (Essential). 

• Change Management: Professional certification in a recognised change management framework at practitioner level or above (Prosci ADKAR Certified Change Practitioner, ACMP Certified Change Management Professional (CCMP), or equivalent (Essential).  

• Programme / Portfolio Governance: Professional certification in programme or portfolio management. The Intake, Prioritisation, and Portfolio Value Identification capabilities require formal governance design competence that is independently verified (Essential). 

• Strategy: Evidence of formal strategy training or certification from tier 1 management consulting firms (MBB), great pedigree executive strategy programmes (INSEAD/Oxford or equivalent (Strongly Preferred). 

• Data and AI Literacy: Completion of a recognised AI and data literacy programme. Sufficient to engage credibly with the CDAIO's technical capability leads and to lead the enterprise data and AI literacy programme with personal authority. (Advantageous) 

 

Work Experience: 

 

• 15–20 years of progressive leadership experience in strategy, business engagement, change management, or transformation functions with at least 5 years in a large financial services institution. 

• Demonstrated experience owning a cross-functional strategy or transformation mandate without direct authority over all delivery teams with a track record of achieving outcomes through influence, governance design, and coalition-building. 

• Experience designing, implementing, and governing enterprise-scale change programmes with measurable adoption outcomes (not just delivery completion) as the primary success metric. 

• Experience presenting to and advising board committees, Group Exco, and C-suite executives, with a track record of producing communications that meet board-grade narrative and analytical standards. 

• Experience designing and running stakeholder engagement models for complex, multi-stakeholder environments, including governance forum design, executive briefing rhythm, and prioritisation framework development. 

• Experience in a data, analytics, AI, or technology transformation context, either as a strategy or change leader embedded in a data function, or as a management consultant specialising in data and AI transformation for financial services clients. 

• Prior experience in a tier 1 or tier 2 management consulting firm with a focus on financial services strategy or transformation is strongly advantageous. 

Knowledge and Skills: 

• Enterprise Strategy Design and Execution: Multi-year AI and data strategy design; initiative portfolio construction; value realisation frameworks; board-grade investment submissions. 

• Change Framework Design and Governance: Design, implementation, and maintenance of enterprise change frameworks against global best practice. Formal ownership accountability, not advisory. 

• Business Engagement and Stakeholder Orchestration: Structured engagement model design, governance forum design, executive briefing and communication rhythm; prioritisation framework development. 

• Portfolio Value Identification: Benefits definition, measurement, and communication, value hypothesis construction, data and AI value delivery measurement tool design (e.g. Balanced Scorecard methodology).   

• Programme Prioritisation and Governance: Intake-to-delivery workflow design, RACI by work type,  demand management and capacity planning, portfolio sequencing against strategic alignment, value, risk, and capacity. 

• Executive Communication and Narrative: Board-grade narrative construction, governance storytelling, AI and data translation for non-technical audiences, consistent multi-stakeholder communications management. 

• AI and Data Landscape Literacy: Sufficient working knowledge of AI, ML, and data platforms to engage CDAIO technical leads credibly and to lead the enterprise data and AI literacy programme with authority. 

• Regulatory and Governance Frameworks: POPIA, BCBS 239, OECD AI Principles, NIST AI RMF, Absa Group governance architecture. 

• Embedment and Training Framework Design: Minimum standards and templates for enterprise training, adoption measurement, structured onboarding for new capabilities and AI literacy programme design. 

• Horizon Scanning and Competitive Intelligence: Structured monitoring of data and AI transformation landscape, engagement with peer institutions and academic bodies, translation of external intelligence into CDAIO strategy input. 

• Organisational Design and Operating Model: Target operating model design for data functions, federated vs centralised governance trade-offs, capability maturity assessment and operating model evolution. 

Education

Postgraduate Degrees and Professional Qualifications: Business, Commerce and Management Studies

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised