Business Architect

Job summary

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime and migration.

We are recruiting for an experienced Business Architects to support the Census 2031.

Census 2031 represents our most ambitious data collection project yet, a once in a decade opportunity to capture a complete picture of everyone living in England and Wales. Building on the digital success of 2021, we're pioneering new ways to reach every household and community, ensuring no one is left uncounted. This vital work will provide the foundation for policy decisions, resource allocation, and community planning for the next decade.

Job description

The Census Design team is helping shape the future of one of the UK’s largest and most significant public service programmes. Census provides vital data that informs decision-making across government, public services and society.

Working within a multidisciplinary team of business analysts, architects, service designers and delivery professionals, you will help define the strategic direction for Census 2031 and future census initiatives. The team brings together business needs, operational requirements and future opportunities to design sustainable, effective services.

This role offers the opportunity to work across a wide range of strategic challenges, influencing business objectives, future operating models and long-term organisational change. You will collaborate with senior stakeholders across ONS and government to help shape and deliver a nationally significant programme that impacts millions of people.

As a Business Architect, you will lead business architecture across programme, translating strategic objectives into effective business design and delivery. Working with senior leaders, you will shape transformation initiatives, support decision-making and provide expert guidance on complex business challenges and solutions.

Professional membership of the Business Architecture Guild, or a willingness to work towards membership, is desirable.

Responsibilities

• Support executive level work and management of the business architecture practice.
• Guide others in using appropriate business architectural tools and methods.
• Understand and apply business architectural principles, techniques, and tools to business scenarios.
• Create business architecture artefacts, including abstract representations of the organisation, knowing when to apply them.
• Develop standard and scalable models to collect, aggregate, or disaggregate complex information.

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Business architecture (Practitioner) - Apply and develop business architecture frameworks, principles and techniques in your organisation. Advise and guide the organisation to inform the implementation of its strategy. Share the value of business architecture with the organisation. Make decisions characterised by medium levels of risk and complexity and recommend decisions as risk and complexity increase. Build consensus between services or independent stakeholders.
• Methods and Tools (Practitioner) - Build capability in methods and tools, ensuring they are adopted consistently and used effectively.
• Stakeholder relationship management (Practitioner) - Work with the team to develop and maintain an understanding of stakeholders. Work with the team to develop and implement stakeholder communications strategies. Identify and resolve issues, influence stakeholders and manage relationships effectively. Build long-term strategic relationships and communicate clearly and regularly with stakeholders
• Strategic design and Business Change (Practitioner) - Demonstrate a good understanding of business issues, events and activities, and their short to long term impact. Support defining principles, patterns, standards, policies, roadmaps and vision statements. Effectively focus on outcomes rather than solutions. Help to develop, maintain or update strategy in response to feedback and findings.
• Strategic thinking (Practitioner) - Define strategies and policies, providing guidance to others on working in the strategic context. Evaluate current strategies to ensure business requirements are being met and exceeded where possible.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Communicating and Influencing
• Changing and Improving
• Working Together

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Business architecture

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £56,861, Office for National Statistics contributes £16,472 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

The Office for National Statistics is part of the Civil Service, and as such we share a number of key benefits with other departments, whilst also having our own unique offerings to support our valued colleagues across the organisation.

Whether you are hearing about us for the first time or already know a bit about our organisation, we hope that our careers site will give you a great insight into the benefits and facilities available to our colleagues, and our fantastic working culture.

Inclusion & Accessibility

At ONS we are always looking to attract the very best people from the widest possible talent pool, and we are proud to be an inclusive, equal opportunities employer. As a Disability Confident Leader we’re committed to ensuring that all candidates are treated fairly throughout the recruitment process.

As part of our application process, you will be prompted to provide details of any reasonable adjustments to our recruitment process that you need. If you would like to discuss any reasonable adjustments before applying, please contact the recruitment team in the first instance.

If you would like an accessible version of any of the attachments or recruitment documents below or linked to in this advert, please contact the recruitment team who will be happy to assist.

ONS are committed to flexible ways of working that support a healthy work-life balance. ONS has already considered how this job could be right sized for applicants working flexibly and we are happy to explore options with you about working part time, in a job share or flexibly, in line with our hybrid working policies.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

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