Feb 2022 – PresentRemote from
South Africa
South Africa
Advania UK (formerly Content+Cloud)
Internal Lead Architect, Aug 2024 – Present | Internal Systems Architect, Feb 2022 – Aug 2024
Architect for the internal business systems team through Content+Cloud's acquisition by Advania Group and rebrand to Advania UK. Promoted to lead the team's architecture, and took on the Data Warehouse Architect role as additional duties.
Leadership and governance
- Lead the business systems architecture function: an internal Business Central Architect, Azure data engineer, automation engineer and senior engineer, plus outsourced Dynamics 365 and Workato Solutions Architects and their developers across two partners.
- Lead the business systems Technical Design Authority, maintaining the standard patterns and governance every design is reviewed against. I own the functional designs, review every partner's low-level designs before build, and keep requirements and decisions versioned with a decision log.
Lead-to-cash and business applications
- Designed and own the technical lead-to-cash flow across Dynamics 365 Sales, DealHub CPQ, BillingPlatform and Business Central, replacing a manual process with inconsistent selling and uncontrolled data entry. Live within 12 months via Workato and improved in phases since, it handles 200–300 orders a month across MSP and Consulting and is being extended to VAR.
- Helped select BillingPlatform to replace NetSuite, using a weighted scorecard built from business use cases and a vendor questionnaire; one of three technical assessors on a six-person panel. Designed the integration so contracts and service items flow from Dynamics into billing, keeping users in the system they know. Live in Nov 2024, with 600 customers and thousands of subscriptions and usage lines migrated in batches by March 2025.
- Designed and built a contract lifecycle management solution in Dynamics 365 model-driven apps, including the data schema, quote-to-contract automation and DealHub changes. It creates around 500 service items a month and gives account and service managers an accurate view of every customer's services, after a major clean-up of service dates and billing terms.
- Automated Microsoft CSP billing for 700 customers by integrating Cloudmore invoice data into BillingPlatform and Business Central, cutting Finance's monthly invoicing from over 5 days to 2 hours of review, with the 1–2 monthly exceptions caught by operations first.
- Technical owner of Dynamics 365 Sales (around 450 users) and Customer Service (50 users) and the wider Power Platform, including Dataverse capacity. Moved Finance Operations from email and Teams onto Customer Service with case routing and parallel case tasks, integrated with the customer portal.
Integration, APIs and customer portal
- Technical and service owner of the Workato iPaaS (400+ recipes). Designed its layered system, orchestration and presentation architecture over a common data model, so retiring a source system means swapping one connection rather than rebuilding every integration. Evaluated it against Logic Apps, Azure Functions and Power Automate, and set the standard: Power Automate for work inside Dynamics, Workato for anything that crosses systems.
- Core architecture stakeholder for One Portal, which replaces separate customer portals with one secure view of invoices, credits, subscriptions and quotes. Shaped its access model (invite-only, role-based, SSO), originated features including auditing, notifications, multi-company and partner views, and designed its Workato API layer and CSP self-service tenant onboarding. Scaled from 10 to 100 customers and now rolling out to the full base.
- Designed SSO across SAML, OpenID Connect and OAuth with Entra ID, including SCIM provisioning and custom-built SCIM integrations.
Data platform
- Technical owner of the move from a legacy SQL Server ETL warehouse to an Azure Databricks lakehouse (ELT, bronze/silver/gold), consolidating 10+ sources including Business Central, Dynamics 365, HubSpot, DealHub, Cloudmore, Kantata and legacy System21 into the company's first validated reporting layer. I own the architecture, security, governance and operations, and specify every new source for the data engineer to build.
- Aligned pipelines to business units for cost attribution, with refresh matched to need down to every 15 minutes. Added data-quality monitoring, ML forecasting and analyst self-service on silver data, and lead Databricks Genie pilots for CSP and Sales Insights, covering new tenants and revenue, and quote-to-invoice conversion by business unit.
AI and automation
- Co-wrote the company's AI governance framework, setting delivery standards for AI work and secure design of core platforms such as Power Platform.
- Designed an order-validation agent in Workato Genie, chosen after a Copilot Studio trial fell short. It checks 30–50 orders a day, notes every pass or failure and flags issues before release, saving about 15 minutes per order while a person keeps final approval.
- Built Copilot Studio assistants: an Azure DevOps delivery assistant for a 10-person team with no delivery manager, and an HR and training assistant in Teams answering thousands of questions a month from approved policy content, improved by a monthly review board.