IDS Service Owner/Deputy Director
8 Months
Inside IR35
£.00 +
Hybrid working
This role is responsible for the design, development, and subsequently day-to-day operations of the Service, ensuring the IDS meets the needs of its users. The role holder will be responsible for maintaining our reputation with high profile external organisations and ensuring the service is innovative and responsive to analyst’s needs.
This role will require a strong, enthusiastic leader, comfortable managing a wide range of, quickly changing, priorities, engaging with senior stakeholders from all sectors and ensuring their staff are well supported and motivated throughout.
Job Description
The Integrated Data Service (IDS) is intended to transform the way data are managed, used and shared across government, unlocking their potential to increase efficiency, improve policy and decision-making and provide better public services. The service is now in Public Beta and is being delivered by the Integrated Data Programme (IDP), recognised on the Government Major Programme Portfolio.
This post reports to the Programme Director of the Integrated Data Programme (IDP), who in turn reports to the Deputy National Statistician, Data Capability, who is the SRO for the programme.
The key focus of this role will be to be to act as service owner, responsible for designing the IDS operational delivery model to provide an enhanced service to make data available to external researchers and the academic community. The role holder will be responsible for building and maintaining our reputation with high profile external organisations and to develop the service to be innovative and responsive to researchers’ needs.
In the role of Deputy Director, IDS Service Owner and Head of Operations, you will be responsible for the development, build, mobilisation, testing, and running of the IDS. You will build and develop a team that effectively engages and collaborates internally and externally to drive the delivery of strategy and objectives. Continuously improving and building the service provided to meet the service level requirements and the expectations for growth in this area. As a member of the Integrated Data Programme (IDP) Directorate’s senior leadership team, you will play a leading role in developing this new directorate and implementing corporate and directorate policies.
The post’s span of control includes responsibility for a self-contained area that will rapidly grow to provide a strategically important service to the academic community.
The post holder will have direct line management of a multi-disciplinary team, with the final size and structure of the team to be defined by the successful candidate, working with the Director.
Responsibilities
* Service Owner, ensuring the needs of the business, technical solutions, strategic intent, security requirements, and customer needs are identified, prioritised, and aligned wherever possible. Lead responsibility for establishing and owning design principles and acceptance of products into the service following user testing;
* Lead for engagement with delivery partners and suppliers (including Google) ensuring service and business needs are understood and met;
* Lead the operational teams delivering the live Integrated Data Service for analysts in government, devolved administrations and accredited external researchers, meeting all operational targets for uptime, service quality and security;
* Implement and operate the IDS Service Wrapper providing the end-to-end functions covering all legal and administrative requirements. This includes lead responsibility for agreeing data sharing agreements with customers (especially main Whitehall departments);
* Manage the user on-boarding activity and the user relationship to oversee fixes to immediate problems and capturing wider improvement needs;
* Monitor the user experience and seek to continuously improve operations as the service matures to ensure users enjoy the best experience possible;
* Establish an IDS user community to build a stakeholder relationship for the live service;
* Promote the service to build and enhance its reputation as a key UK Trusted Research Environment;
* Maintain significant relationships with ethics, data and security specialists to ensure subject matter expertise is appropriately injected into the operation;
* Actively engage with Data Privacy groups to ensure they are consulted and onboard with the ONS strategy to use data for research.
Person Specification/Essential skills
* Experience as a Service Owner and Operations Lead in designing and delivering a future operating model providing a transformed digital or data service to a diverse user base with a focus on outcomes, service coherence, and delivery rather than solutions;
* Experience of user focus, developing and managing effective relationships with key stakeholders particularly in offering a quality service which meets customer requirements. You can understand users and identify who they are and what their needs are, based on evidence. You can translate user stories and propose design approaches or services to meet these needs.
* Experience of contract management with external users and delivery against service level agreements;
* Experience of managing competing strategic priorities, and communicating decisions effectively with a key focus to lead on end to end and user testing, and service readiness – including key assurance points to test business and operational readiness prior to go live;
* Strong interpersonal and people management skills, ideally working in a Matrix management environment; experienced leader focused on building new high performing teams with an emphasis on delivery;
* Experience of delivering continuous improvement to a service, evidencing ability to combine innovation and improvements in efficiency with regular delivery.
Desirable
* Awareness of public policy context and how data analysis is utilised inside and outside of government;
Certes Computing (and all of its subsidiary companies) is committed to promoting equality and diversity in its business operations.
