Service Architect

About RS Group

Across the industrial design, manufacturing and maintenance worlds, we’re the digital destination for product and service solutions to help our customers with the maintenance, repair and operation of their businesses. We provide global access to an unrivalled range of over 750,000 stocked industrial products. Each day our team of experts deliver solutions to resolve our customer’s challenges across design, procurement, inventory and maintenance. We consistently strive to deliver the best possible service to all of our customers and challenge ourselves to provide a seamless procurement experience.

We are one team. We deliver brilliantly. We do the right thing. We make every day better. These are our values. They unite our c.9,000 global colleagues and differentiate us from our competition. They are a mix of how we work today and how we must step up for the future. Most importantly, it is one set of values shaped by our people, for our people.

Together, we can make great things happen. Aim for amazing and beyond.

About the Role

Role Purpose

RS Group is currently seeking a permanent Service Architect to join our team. As a Service Architect, you will design and develop IT services that meet and exceed customer and business expectations. You will be involved throughout the entire IT service lifecycle—from early strategy through design, transition, operation, and continuous improvement—ensuring services align with business goals and requirements. This includes defining service standards, policies, processes, and architectures that guide implementation and operation of the services, while optimizing the customer experience and service value. To excel in this role, you will leverage a mix of business analysis and service design skills, technical expertise across multiple domains, strong communication and negotiation capabilities, plus solid project and financial management proficiency.

Responsibilities

•                     Collaborate with business leaders, architects, and stakeholders to ensure services align with enterprise goals and future state roadmaps. This includes engagement early in new technology request to define strategic direction, shape services requirements and influence solution architecture. The entire service value chain should be considered: engage, plan, design & transition, obtain & build, deliver & support, improve.

•                     Facilitate ITIL strategy, design, and transition stages of the IT service lifecycle. This includes a focus on aligning IT services with business goals and defining standards, policies, and architectures for implementation and ongoing operations through to continuous improvement (CI).

•                     Develop customer journey maps to ensure services are designed with optimal customer experience (CX) in mind, incorporating experience-level agreements (XLAs) alongside traditional SLAs.

•                     Ensure all aspects of service lifecycle are organizationally aligned, requiring business analysis, communication, and strategic planning to ensure IT services meet business needs and expectations now and into the future.

•                     Manage all service activities, from initial service introduction assessment to creating necessary service artifacts to support the entire service lifecycle including go-live and (CI). This may include business case, design pack, service level agreements, capacity and availability planning, continuity plan, risk & security analysis, change, release, test deployment and so on.

•                     Represent service and operational interests through all project phases specifying key requirements (functional, non-functional, etc.) and validating compliance with agreed business criticality.

•                     Assure that solution and service designs correctly account for the current operational environment and business and operational needs. Where a gap is identified, the models, templates, systems, etc. are updated to ensure long-term sustainability.

•                     Develop and define appropriate resourcing profiles, support costs, and licenses for delivering the required service over the service lifecycle.

•                     Develop detailed financial models for services, including ROI analysis, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculations, and service portfolio investment planning.

•                     Validate service outcomes, which may be done through balanced scorecard, KPI, KPM, etc. to ensure they meet strategic, operational, technical, architectural, support, and user needs for agreed service delivery and (CI).

•                     Work with and interface with third-party suppliers, involving agreement, planning, timelines, and quality of deliverables.

Candidate Requirements

About you

In this role, you'll have the opportunity to foster a culture of continual service improvement. Consistently exploring ways to meet stakeholder expectations, enhance customer and user satisfaction, and improve overall effectiveness and efficiency.

Ideal candidates should have expertise in:

•                     Proven experience in IT Service Management, with deep expertise in ITIL 4 practices across service value system and service lifecycle.

•                     Strong understanding of service governance, service pipeline & catalogue design, balanced scorecard measures, and continuous improvement methods.

•                     Defining services for running, operating, and changing, translating technical and business requirements into service artifacts including, creating and updating a wide range of service documentation and IT operational process maps.

•                     Exposure or experience in Infrastructure, Digital, SaaS, Application (SAP), or Supply Chain technologies.

•                     ITSM toolsets such as ServiceNow, and exposure to architectural frameworks (e.g., TOGAF).

•                     Service Management across various disciplines, including managing third-party suppliers in multi-customer and provider environments.

•                     Strong process competencies with a solid understanding of the Service Value chain.

•                     Operating within complex operational environments with multiple interdependencies across internal and external matrix organizations.

•                     Managing conflicting demands and priorities, with a track record of handling the change and transition aspects of multiple simultaneous new/changed IT services.

Equal Employment Opportunity

RS Americas is an equal opportunity employer and maintains policies and practices that are designed to prevent and prohibit unlawful discrimination against any qualified employee or applicant on the basis of race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, military/veteran status, disability, genetic information, citizenship status, or any other unlawful classification to the extent protected by law. This policy of non-discrimination applies to all employment practices, including hiring, compensation, benefits, promotion, training and termination. Employees who engage in unlawful discrimination will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination.

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