Role Description
At Camden data has always been viewed as one of our most valuable strategic assets and a critical component to helping us unlock solutions to the challenges we face. During the pandemic, our data capabilities have proved instrumental in helping us navigate our relief efforts, but we know more can be done to unlock its value. We want to make data, and the subsequent insight derived from it, even more accessible to staff and citizens – empowering them to make better-informed decisions.
With Camden council running over 600 ‘lines of business’ across the borough, synthesizing data sets across the council and beyond will be particularly important long term. To this end, we’re committed to making ambitious improvements in our data capability. We want to invest in an approach and a team that will strengthen our organisational approach to data – empowering our staff with better tools to turn data into insight-led action.
We now need a Chief Data Officer to be our most senior data officer in the council, leading the development of an organisational approach that will provide better synergies for the data analysis and reporting efforts of our individual services. This role is highly placed within the Council in terms of its strategic accountability, operational profile, impact on the community and the targeted aims and objectives of the council.
Person Description
Reporting to the CDIO, the Chief Data Officer (CDO) is responsible for delivering a step-change in our approach – unlocking better value from Camden’s data and increasing the maturity of the organisation in its use of data. We are looking for a collaborative leader who can build strong relationships across the organisation and is able to work in a highly networked way. The role encompasses data strategy, data governance, technical platform development, process realignment, senior stakeholder management and development of skills and culture. The vision for Camden’s approach will be to utilise our data to:
- Inform how services may be improved and/or delivered in the future
- Inform the development of Council strategies and policies
- Convert insight into clear action by partnering insight with behavioural science and service design principles
- Operationalise the use of descriptive, diagnostic, investigative and predictive analytics in the frontline
- Champion the use of advanced data analytics with a focus on ethical, transparent, and socially responsible practices
- Ensure that our approach to data aligns and compliments our wider organisational commitment to design thinking.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead the data transformation of Camden by defining and executing a council-wide strategy and roadmap which unlocks the unique power of Camden’s data assets, striving for a single source of truth, maximising data quality and security and data governance along the way.
- Building trustful and effective relationships with key senior stakeholders, listening to their needs and problems and determining how our data strategy can help. Ensuring approaches to sharing information take deep consideration of a rapidly changing legislative environment.
- Actively lead our Data Charter work, visibly championing our highly inclusive approach to data privacy and ethics – ensuring the council upholds the standards we have agreed with our citizens.
- Reduce data silos by partnering with the Architecture, Security, Applications, and Infrastructure disciplines to lead the delivery of robust and agile data architecture, platform, and tooling capability to ensure consistency, security, integrity, and agility of data delivery.
- Line management responsibility leading a core team with a view to creating a networked management approach across other data departments across the council.
- Build strong partnerships with LOTI and others relevant organisations. Ensuring Camden are optimised to share data efficiently and ethically – always with our citizens privacy as our highest priority.
- Manage the development and deployment of a new cloud-based master data solution to deliver intersectional data needs and underpin our CX aspirations.
- Actively promote the value of data derived insight throughout the council to build a data-driven culture. This includes working with Learning and Development teams to create constructive training pathways, and organising internal and industry-based events.
- Lead establishment of a framework for council-wide data governance, ensuring high standards of data quality, compliance, and metadata management, promoting transparency around data lineage and metric definition.
- Unlock innovative solutions to our more challenging problems by close partnering with external parties as well as internal disciplines such as design and product. Adopting the use of advanced analytics and data science applications where necessary.
- Work alongside broader data and data analytics stakeholders including the Data Protection Officer to ensure full compliance with data protection legislation, information security and other regulatory requirements.
- Work alongside our wider strategy family, to ensure that data and insight underpins and strengthens the development of our organisational strategy and our responses to the challenges we face.
- Helping drive innovation in our data strategy by having your finger on the pulse with regards to developments across the private and public sectors.
- Be accountable for managing an annual multi million pound budget – ensuring we deliver required outcomes from our investments.
What we are looking for:
Essential
- Three or more years of experience developing and implementing a data strategy across a large and complex organisation – this includes managing the governance, technical and business processes that support the strategy
- A credible and highly collaborative leader with deep experience of building senior-level relationships and influencing key decision-makers in organisations while working in a highly networked way. Adept at translating complex data terminology and principles to a non-technical audience.
- A well-evidenced track record of improving organisational data maturity and data culture in a large, regulated organisation. This includes the development of training pathways for staff, including executive education, to support the transition to a data-driven culture.
- Good understanding of data security best practice approaches.
- Demonstrable experience of applying data science techniques to deliver a positive measured outcome.
- Experience in delivering a data analytics strategy, including a broad knowledge of current data science and business intelligence tools.
- Broad knowledge of current data engineering tools and techniques, including data integration, storage, transformation, and modelling components as part of the end-to-end deployment of data science and organisational intelligence.
- Experienced in selecting and rolling out data self-service-based strategies and associated toolsets to maximise data available to users and ease of access to support a data-centric organisation.
- Strong business casing experience with senior leadership – able to show clear and measurable ROI.
- Organizationally and politically savvy, a consummate diplomat capable of understanding and navigating the personalities, obstacles and politics of the organisation.
Desirable
- Degree educated in Computer Science related field or equivalent experience.
- Public sector experience with a strong understanding of current institutional challenges and priorities.
- Experienced in working with cross-functional product teams and employing agile mindset and principles.
- Experienced in conceptualization and implementation of Qlik data dashboards.
- Experience in MS Azure technologies for data engineering, data science, business intelligence as well as Azure platform management.