HoD Digital Business Support Systems

Role Overview

This role owns the strategy, modernization and day-to-day health of the Business Support Systems estate, reporting to the Chapter Lead – Digital IT. It spans revenue management, value added services, enterprise integration, contact centre, order management and financial reporting, so the platforms under this leader's control directly shape how customers are acquired, how revenue is captured and how quickly new digital services reach the market. Success means replacing heavy legacy platforms with cloud-native, AI-native, TMF Open API-compliant building blocks while keeping the lights on at near-perfect availability.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the three-year technical roadmap (LRP) and architecture standards for BSS, VAS and integration platforms, steering the estate away from complex monolithic systems toward simplified, cost-efficient, composable and TMF Open API-compliant designs, and leading vendor selection, partnership strategy and data governance.
• Rebuild fragmented channel tools into digital-first, AI-driven CARE and self-service platforms, embedding automation and agentic systems that handle customer events predictively, and enabling converged Customer 360/MDM data with insights-led go-to-market tooling for trade, retail and marketing.
• Move delivery away from ticket-based waterfall practice toward composable platforms supporting weekly releases with automated regression and testing, with reusable artefacts built centrally and shared across Tribes — targeting more than 30% faster time to market through "build once, use many" templates and 100% delivery yield on PI commitments.
• Establish and lead centralized Platform and SRE squads that provide 24/7 maintenance, predictive operations and zero-touch operations for every business squad, driving AIOps and business continuity planning against targets of greater than 99.99% system availability and MTTR under 30 minutes.
• Direct departmental CAPEX (approximately KES 5B) and OPEX (approximately KES 2B) budgets with zero revenue leakage and no overdue audit issues, maintaining compliance with Safaricom policies and ISO standards.
• Lead agile adoption, squad structure design and chapter development, coaching technical teams to take ownership of outcomes while creating an inclusive environment that protects the safety and wellbeing of others.
• Partner with the senior executive team, business leaders and external vendors to ensure systems and services remain reliable, secure, scalable and fit for the future across the full lifecycle.
• Translate external market, customer, partner and competitor insight into growth opportunities, and create the psychological safety that lets teams test new ideas, learn fast from digital adoption and scale what works.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Degree in Information Services, BSc Computer Science, BSc Electrical Engineering or a comparable tertiary qualification.
• More than 10 years of management experience in a technical delivery and operations domain.
• Proven experience leading Business Support Systems across planning, delivery and operations.
• Working knowledge of billing and VAS products and services.
• Solid grounding in enterprise integration.
• Demonstrated responsibility for approving and monitoring departmental OPEX and CAPEX budgets, including direct accountability for budget pools at the scale described above (CAPEX approximately KES 5B, OPEX approximately KES 2B).
• Track record of setting an inspiring team vision, challenging conventional approaches, breaking silos through active collaboration and developing others to take ownership of results.