Job Specifications
Are you looking to begin or grow a career in IT architecture? Or perhaps you are currently working as an architect and looking for a new challenge? Social Security Scotland has an exciting opportunity for an Enterprise Architect to join the team and drive our young and growing organisation further forward, developing strategies, improving its business processes and shaping the future of its technology, all making a positive impact on our clients’ lives.
This is a Fixed Term Appointment opportunity for 47 months with the possibility of permanency dependent on business requirements.
You may already be working as an analyst and looking to step up into a more senior design role, or you may be a technical architect with a desire to work on an enterprise-wide canvas. In any case you can expect to work with a friendly, dynamic, talented and self-motivated team with a great opportunity to apply your experience and ideas and make direct and tangible improvements to the services we deliver to our clients and colleagues.
The post will be based in either Dundee or Glasgow with regular travel to provide leadership across all sites as well as engage extensively with Scottish Government colleagues based in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Responsibilities
Enterprise Architects are leaders working across different levels within an organisation to translate the business strategy into business change and technical delivery.
They Are Responsible For
Identifying change priorities to enable rapid delivery.
Leading and influencing cross-cutting capability delivery for change.
Owning the enterprise architecture vision, strategy, and road-maps, covering current, future, and transitional states across business, technology and data.
Facilitating collaboration across the organisation.
Understanding the ecosystem and inter-dependencies, including reference architectures.
Taking a strategic view across all architectural domains, portfolios, and programmes.
Guiding decisions on business, technology, and data to promote reuse, sustainability, and scalability, maximising value and reducing risk.
Establishing architectural principles, policies, and standards.
Collaborating with stakeholders to ensure decisions align with EA strategy.
Developing the architecture community.
Conducting horizon scanning to identify industry trends and their potential organisational impact and opportunities.
Additional Duties
Engage with projects and partners to understand scope and design appropriate enterprise architectures.
Collaborate with senior stakeholders to provide direction and challenge, reaching consensus.
Identify problems proactively and translate them into understandable non-technical descriptions.
Act as the enterprise architecture expert in stakeholder engagement and scene setting.
Support domain assurance functions aligned with governance principles and standards.
Contribute to developing architecture strategies.
Deeply understand Social Security Scotland’s business strategy to identify suitable solutions and road-maps.
Analyse options thoroughly to recommend appropriate approaches across environments and organisational models.
Act as a ‘critical friend’ to stakeholders on best practice technology use.
Promote a culture of continuous delivery and improvement, guiding governance, digital, and organisational design.
Produce and maintain enterprise architecture deliverables throughout the project life-cycle and beyond.
Collaborate with cyber security colleagues to ensure architectures are robust, scalable and secure.
Review external technical proposals and contribute to implementation recommendations.
Work within agile, multi-disciplinary teams, applying agile methods where appropriate.
Foster an open, collaborative approach to knowledge sharing.
Contribute to the development of an enterprise practice within the wider Architecture team.
Act as a communicator between technical and non-technical audiences and stakeholders.
Success Profiles
We use an assessment framework called ‘Success Profiles’ which lists the elements we test and provides detailed descriptions of each. Find out more about the framework here.
For this post, the following Success Profile elements will be assessed:
Essential Experience
Enterprise architecture frameworks for managing design governance, strategic development and stakeholder communication.
Defining aligned business and technology strategies by means of developing and maintaining technology road-maps and architectural models.
Behaviours
Leadership (Level 4)
Communicating and Influencing (Level 4)
You can find out more about Success Profiles Behaviours here: Success Profiles - Civil Service Behaviours (publishing.service.gov.uk)
Technical/Professional Skills:
This role is aligned to the Senior Enterprise Architect job role level within the Digital, Data and Technology Profession.
These skills will be tested during the Technical Assessment if you are successful at sift stage. They will be not be assessed at ap
About the Company
We are an Executive Agency of the Scottish Government.
We have been set up to administer the new Scottish social security system.
Our aim:
Contribute to the creation of a fairer society.
Our vision:
Provide support to each of us when we need it.
The benefits we deliver are being introduced in stages. Once fully operational, we will deliver benefits for people on low incomes, disabled people, carers, young people entering the workplace and to help people heat their homes.
Know more