Head of IT (care for children) 957

Huddersfield, Huddersfield, United Kingdom

Our client, a national charity and membership association representing children across the UK, provides facilities for the best possible care and education to young children. The voice of their sector and an integral part of the lives of nearly one million children and their families. The organization works with local and national government to develop an environment in which quality early years education and care can flourish.

Primary focus of the role:

To define and deliver the IT strategy, ensuring this is aligned to the current business priorities and the long-term business strategy.

Ensure the IT strategy meets business needs with clear and measurable outcomes focusing on value for money, financial, quality, regulatory, security and contractual requirements.

Ensure the organisation is fully supported and protected with appropriate IT infrastructure and systems.

To lead the IT team to ensure the organisation receives effective support and delivers against the business objectives.

To deliver and embed sustainable, high quality and cutting-edge IT capability and smarter business working solutions and systems that meet the needs of operations and central support functions.

To project manage key business projects to ensure they are delivered on-time, within budget and in line with the project requirements.

To develop and deliver IT solutions that improve organisational efficiency and automate manual processes.

Personal attributes:

Communication: Facilitates clear and effective communication throughout the organisation. Conveys sensitive and complex information in an appropriate way. Deals with difficult situations immediately, efficiently, effectively and sensitively. Communicates with confidence and authority. Uses personal skills, knowledge, and impact to influence others.

Working with others: Puts team and organisational needs ahead of personal aspirations. Participates in activity across internal and external teams to achieve organisational objectives. Manages relationships to maximise effectiveness.

People development: Ensures that long and short term organisational development needs are addressed in a cost effective way. Monitors and reviews departmental infrastructure to enable staff to develop. Promotes a climate supportive of self-development. Recognises, plans for and acts upon need to develop individuals for succession planning.

Leadership: Encourages and enables others to use professional judgement and act decisively. Continually challenges to ensure practices are aligned with vision, mission, values and objectives. Uses own knowledge and draws on knowledge of others to inform business planning. Inspires commitment and loyalty. Proactively develops the team to meet current and future planning needs.

Improvement and innovation: Uses internal and external resources and ideas to create innovative solutions. Informs strategic direction for change and continuous improvement. Explores options beyond current practice and assumption. Enables identified improvements to be implemented across for maximum benefit. Identifies and shares new or emerging areas of service.

Customer care: Champions the customer’s current and potential needs to drive organisational service delivery. Establishes and maintains long term stakeholder relationships.

Commercial awareness: Monitors external environment to identify underlying and emerging trends, shares information across teams and takes or supports appropriate internal action. Recommends commercial decisions which benefit the whole organisation. Understands the complexities and limitations of the organisation. Recognises the implications of strategic position on decision making.

Planning and organising: Develops plans to meet organisational objectives. Identifies and recommends the best use of organisation’s resources to achieve objectives. Continually reviews, monitors and plans, balancing short and long term priorities. Champions initiatives and drives them to realisation.

A positive approach: Creates an open, supportive environment to facilitate a ‘can do’ approach amongst others. Accurately assesses risks and takes them when appropriate. Drives organisation forward through commitment, enthusiasm and personal approach.

Skills and Abilities

• Able to understand and document business processes and communicate technically complex information in business terms.
• Able to document business and technical requirements and review supplier submissions against requirements.
• Ability to produce cost/benefit analyses and options appraisal documents, and to present these to senior management.
• Sound analytical and problem solving skills.
• Strong interpersonal skills.
• Effective communication skills both written and oral.
• Evidence of being an effective team player.
• Demonstrate commitment to customer engagement and support.
• Evidence of delivering to tight deadlines and managing competing priorities.
• Ability to remain calm in challenging situations.
• Computer Operations.
• Systems/Web Programming (PHP/SQL).
• Methodical approach.
• Good at building relationships.

Responsibilities

Role specific responsibilities

• Work closely with the Senior Management Team and wider teams to review current systems and business processes and then identify and deliver IT solutions that improve these from efficiency, cost and end-user perspectives.
• Attend Board meetings to present IT reports as and when required.
• Lead cross-functional project teams to deliver improved systems, processes, and procedures.
• Ensure effective day to day management of the in-house IT support services, ensuring KPI and SLA targets are met around service requests, incident management, equipment and IT resource requests.
• Define and develop strategic approach to IT, to include consideration for procurement, governance, capability, risk and security.
• Accountable for the IT budget, ensuring costs remain within budget, and additionally making recommendations on how IT solutions could make other areas of the organisation more cost effective.
• Accountable for business continuity in respect of all IT and business systems.
• Ensure there are appropriate and effective IT systems, controls, policies, and procedures in place to mitigate any IT risks, for example in relation to IT security and GDPR.
• Responsibility for maintaining up to date knowledge on GDPR and Data Protection legislation and accountability for ensuring our IT policy and procedures are up to date in accordance with current legislation and risk.
• Responsible for ensuring all staff are trained and understand their responsibility relating to data protection and GDPR.
• Responsible for ensuring digital services comply with and meet recognised industry standards, such as ISO 27001; Cyber Essentials; GDPR; Data security, minimising data risk events. Exceeding recognised good practice and standards, where possible.
• Drive the performance of the IT and project teams through effective leadership, management, and development of the team.
• Chair the Technology Advisory Committee meetings, and participate in key working groups across the organisation as needed.
• Build effective relationships with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders (especially with 3rd parties) to enhance the reputation of IT function internally and across the sector.
• Champion values and promote and lead a culture of continuous improvement within the team.
• Identify commercial opportunities based upon external experience and relationships.
• Drive own personal development, to include maintaining an awareness and up to date knowledge of IT and systems developments in the early years sector and other related sectors to inform the organisation’s future IT strategy and approach.

In carrying out the duties and responsibilities set out within the job description and in the context of developing working relationships with others, the post holder will be expected to demonstrate commitment to and comply with the specific requirements and the spirit of Equal Opportunities Policy. The principle applies equally to all aspects of the role including any responsibilities relating to the provision and development of services.