Head of Advanced Analytics

Department for Work and Pensions

Birmingham, Blackpool, Leeds, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield – Hybrid working 40/60

  • Location Birmingham, Blackpool, Leeds, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield – Hybrid working 40/60
  • Sector Central Government, IT
  • Client Department for Work and Pensions
  • Job Type Permanent
  • Salary/Remuneration Circa £110,000
  • Reference GSe101501
  • Closing Date Monday 25th September 2023

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) touches the lives of every citizen in the country at some point in their life. Our mission is clear, to improve people’s quality of life both now and in the future.

DWP has a role to support the most vulnerable people in society. Our departmental aims are to:

  • Support those who can work; whilst protecting those that cannot
  • Increase saving for, and security in, later life
  • Run an effective welfare system

DWP are driving several major programmes of change where data is a key differentiator. where data is a key differentiator. These Change Programmes include Universal Credit, Service Modernisation as well as Fraud, Error and Debt. Our challenge is to best support individual citizens gain financial support needed, prevent fraud, error and debt and maximise their ability to progress all whilst reducing the overall cost to serve.

The person:

We are looking for an experienced professional to be the Head of Advanced Analytics and lead this capability within DWP Digital. You will directly manage a mixed disciplinary team of up over 100 staff that will include agile product teams plus data scientists, digital performance analysts, data engineers and software engineers. The role reports directly to Digital’s Director of Data & Analytics, who is also DWP’s Chief Data Officer.

The role:

You will have a wide remit to support major change, lead on DWP Strategic Reference Architecture (SRA) and be the domain leader for Artificial Intelligence (AI), including Generative AI, for the department. You will tie these areas together, operating at executive-level across multiple programmes and all areas of Digital to drive forward the analytics agenda.

 

The DWP Head of Advanced Analytics has a leading voice across Government in this domain due to our progress, experience, and scale in this field.

Supporting Major Change: Data & Analytics (D&A) provide our services and major Change Programmes with the analytics capabilities, insights, and specialist skills to meet critical DWP objectives.

Strategic Capabilities: Analytics is also a key component in the Dept’s Strategic Reference Architecture. D&A product teams are evolving the cloud-based capabilities that enable sophisticated machine learning, faster time to insights and also ways to operationalise analytics into user journeys.

Responsible AI: We are at a point where technology like AI is moving at a rapid pace. This needs domain leadership to accelerate our adoption but to do so responsibly.

The role also has a level of managing people and functions as follows:

  1. Insight teams –these are dominated by Data Scientists, Digital Performance Analysts or Data Engineers acting as embedded roles within key business teams (IRIS’s counter fraud or IPE’s performance teams) or change programmes (e.g. Universal Credit or Service Modernisation) to support their Analytics needs.
  2. Data Ops teams –multi-disciplinary teams who are responsible for creating, automating, and enhancing the advanced data pipelines needed by the insight teams or to operationalise analytics.
  3. Product Teams –multi-disciplinary teams responsible for developing cloud-based analytics applications as part of the Strategic Reference Architecture including the core Analytics Service and Risk Engine.

Essential Criteria

  • To succeed in this role, you must be able to demonstrate the following key skills and experience:
  • Experience of leading an Analytics function in a large and complex organisation, such as financial services or retail
  • Evidence of strategic thinking and problem solving in the application of a range of advanced analytics approaches such as supervised and unsupervised machine learning, segmentation and personalisation, graph analytics, natural language processing, process mining, optimisation, and large language models
  • A proven record of building, developing, and coaching diverse data teams whether data science, performance analysts or engineering teams
  • Strong appreciation of the analytics technology landscape (including cloud services and open-source technologies) allied to a good appreciation of data solutions architecture and related tools and technologies
  • A proven track record of building partnerships with senior stakeholders in a matrix organisation. Communicating and presenting with conviction to persuade and influence others of the benefits of data analytics in the face of scrutiny and challenge
  • A strong appreciation of risk management relating to data security, data protection and ethics
  • A proven track record in successfully managing projects and programs within agile and/ or waterfall approaches.

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Documents

  1. How to write a Suitability Statement.pdf

Contacts

Shoaib Haroon: 07384 258 626
Katherine O'Donnell: 07570 654500

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