Managing Director – Applications Portfolio

In brief

**Job Title:** Managing Director – Applications Portfolio **Company:** NTT **Overview** NTT DATA is seeking an accomplished executive to lead its South African Applications Portfolio. This role is strategically significant, aiming to integrate Applications, SAP, Customer Experience (CX), Business Process Services (BPS), and Data into a single, market-facing business. The purpose of this position is to shape the portfolio’s direction, accelerate sustainable growth, strengthen market relevance, and deliver profitable expansion for NTT DATA South Africa. The Managing Director will provide end-to-end strategic, commercial, and operational leadership for the full Applications Portfolio, being accountable for creating a coherent portfolio strategy, integrating capabilities across service lines, and taking differentiated, industry-relevant solutions to market. The role encompasses full accountability for profit and loss performance, growth strategy, sales enablement, market development, portfolio innovation, delivery excellence, partner performance, and talent leadership within a highly matrixed global organisation. The incumbent will also translate global priorities into locally relevant execution, connect specialist capabilities into integrated client propositions, and build a scalable, profitable, and sustainable business. **What you will do** The Managing Director will be responsible for: * **Portfolio Strategy and Business Leadership:** * Defining and executing an integrated South African strategy across Applications, SAP, CX, BPS and Data. * Creating clear portfolio choices, priorities and investment plans that strengthen growth, differentiation and profitability. * Connecting capabilities across the portfolio to form end-to-end, industry-led client solutions rather than stand-alone service offerings. * Localising global strategic priorities and offerings into executable South African growth plans. * Leading transformation initiatives that improve competitiveness, relevance, scalability and speed to market. * Balancing portfolio growth with disciplined operational management and customer-centred execution. * **Commercial and P&L Leadership:** * Owning full portfolio profit and loss accountability, including revenue, margin, cost, utilisation and investment performance. * Delivering sustainable revenue growth, profitability and market-share expansion across the portfolio. * Building and maintaining a healthy, balanced pipeline across Applications, SAP, CX, BPS and Data. * Sponsoring strategic pursuits and personally engaging in priority bids, negotiations and complex client opportunities. * Developing long-term account growth strategies with country, industry, sales and delivery leadership. * Applying commercial discipline to pricing, contracting, delivery models and portfolio investment decisions. * **Go-to-Market and Client Leadership:** * Defining and executing a unified go-to-market strategy aligned to global priorities and South African market needs. * Positioning the portfolio around measurable business outcomes, combining advisory, transformation, implementation, managed services and business process capabilities. * Enabling sales teams with compelling propositions, market insights, client stories and pursuit support. * Building trusted relationships with C-suite and Board-level stakeholders and acting as executive sponsor for strategic clients. * Identifying new market opportunities, whitespace and cross-sell potential across the five portfolio domains. * Championing AI-enabled applications, intelligent automation, data-driven services and digital experience innovation. * **Portfolio and Offering Leadership:** * Applications: Grow application development, modernisation, integration, testing, quality engineering, low-code and application management services. * SAP: Expand SAP advisory, transformation, implementation, migration, cloud and managed services capabilities, supported by a strong SAP ecosystem. * Customer Experience CX: Grow customer, employee and digital experience solutions, including CRM, commerce, contact centre and experience-led transformation. * Business Process Services BPS: Scale technology-enabled business process solutions that improve efficiency, service quality and business outcomes. * Data: Grow data strategy, engineering, platforms, analytics, governance and AI-enabled data solutions. * Ensuring offerings are integrated, repeatable, commercially viable and supported by the right skills, alliances and delivery capacity. * **Partner Ecosystem:** * Developing executive relationships with strategic technology partners including SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, Snowflake, Databricks, AWS. * Driving joint go-to-market initiatives, co-innovation, partner investments, certifications and pipeline development. * Ensuring partner strategies support portfolio differentiation, delivery capability and profitable growth. * **Delivery and Operational Leadership:** * Providing executive oversight of delivery across the portfolio, ensuring delivery excellence, customer satisfaction, strong governance, quality outcomes and sustainable profitability. * Creating consistent operating rhythms, performance visibility and accountability across sales, delivery and capability leadership. * Improving productivity, utilisation, workforce mix, delivery methods and reuse of intellectual property and accelerators. * Providing executive leadership for relevant South African delivery capabilities and ensuring effective alignment with global delivery resources. * Acting decisively on delivery risk, client escalation, commercial exposure and operational underperformance. * **People and Culture Leadership:** * Building an inclusive, high-performance culture that attracts, develops and retains scarce and critical talent. * Leading, coaching and inspiring a diverse portfolio leadership team, with clear accountability across the five portfolio domains. * Building succession pipelines and future-ready capability across commercial, technical, consulting and delivery disciplines. * Championing collaboration across business units, industries, countries and global teams. * Creating a strong employee experience grounded in purpose, inclusion, continuous learning and opportunity. **Requirements (from the original advert)** * **Experience:** * 15–20 years’ experience in the technology consulting, IT services or digital transformation industry. * Significant executive leadership experience with accountability for a large, complex services portfolio. * Proven ownership of a substantial P&L and a track record of sustainable revenue growth and improved profitability. * Demonstrated success leading sales, go-to-market, delivery and capability organisations. * Experience building, scaling and transforming businesses across multiple technology or service domains. * Experience operating in highly matrixed, global organisations and leading multicultural teams. * Executive client engagement experience, including complex pursuits, negotiations and strategic account growth. * Experience in South Africa and/or the broader Middle East and Africa market is highly desirable. * **Technical and Industry Expertise:** * Strong understanding of enterprise application services, including development, modernisation, integration, testing and managed services. * Working knowledge of SAP transformation and managed services, enterprise platforms and cloud-enabled operating models. * Understanding of CX technologies and services, including CRM, commerce, contact centre and digital experience. * Understanding of BPS models, intelligent automation and technology-enabled process transformation. * Strong appreciation of data engineering, data platforms, analytics, governance and AI-enabled solutions. * Commercial understanding of partner ecosystems and platforms such as SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, Snowflake, Databricks and AWS. * Ability to translate emerging technology trends into relevant, commercially viable client propositions. * **Qualifications:** * Bachelor’s degree in Business, Technology, Engineering or a related discipline. * MBA or equivalent postgraduate qualification preferred. * **Personal Attributes:** * Commercially astute and growth-oriented * Strategic, decisive and execution-focused * Customer-centric and market-facing * Collaborative and effective in a matrix * Inspirational, resilient and adaptable * Curious, innovative and comfortable with ambiguity * Passion for developing people * Culturally intelligent and credible at Board and C-suite level **Who should apply** This role is for an accomplished executive who combines commercial acumen, strategic vision, and exceptional people leadership with deep expertise across enterprise applications, platforms, data, digital transformation, and technology-enabled business processes. The ideal candidate will operate as an enterprise leader, balancing bold strategic ambition with disciplined execution and commercial judgment. They should be capable of influencing effectively in a global matrix, aligning diverse stakeholders around shared outcomes, and building confidence through authentic, visible, and accountable leadership. The candidate must be able to navigate complexity and ambiguity while maintaining pace, focus, and delivery, and create trusted relationships with clients, partners, employees, and global leadership. **Deadline** Not specified **Reference** Original posting: https://www.myjobmag.co.za/job/managing-director-applications-portfolio-ntt-global-networks Source: myjobmag

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At a glance

• AWS
• SAP
• Salesforce

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