The Home Office has created a deputy director position on its live services team to manage a new strategic service desk and develop a cyber security operations centre.
Home Office offers ‘pivotal’ leadership role in live services – Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
In a job advert the Home Office said that the role, which can be based in either London or Manchester and is a Senior Civil Service pay band 1 position offered at a salary of £100,000, would be a “pivotal” member of the live services leadership team.
“This is much more than a ‘steady state’ operations management role,” the Home Office said. “Transformational leadership and energy is essential to achieve the step-change in capability required to meet our objectives.”
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The Home Office systems support a range of services from visa and passport applications to police checks on people or vehicles, and the live services team supports all Home Office directorates, including security and counter-terrorism, border functions and crime and policing.
Although the Home Office acknowledged that it still uses a “very large” number of third party partners, it said that it was trying to contract in smaller parts and was increasingly assuming direct responsibility for services.
“We are growing highly capable service operations, service management and integration capabilities in-house which can direct the operation of our systems and services delivered across a complex supplier landscape,” the job description said.
The live services organisation is also changing the way it works, with a greater focus on automation, instrumentation and tools to allow proactive management of systems and offer users a self-service route wherever possible.
The new recruit will directly manage critical incidents, improve change management process and have responsibility for training the in-house team and for leading the service operations and support team.
This includes developing a new strategic service desk contract, which will be the first point of contact for users, suppliers and business owners, and will involve implementing self-service strategies and improving services.
The Home Office also stressed the importance of cyber security, saying that it planned to improve its cyber security operations capability and the deputy director will develop a new cyber security operations centre, as well as building relationships with the National Cyber Security Centre.
Other relationships emphasised in the job specification are the business solutions team, the head of technical support services, those working in the infrastructure and platforms team and the quality assurance team in the digital, data and technology profession.
The job advert also stated that the deputy director would co-ordinate the roll-out of new end-user services across the Home Office, improve the incident reporting functions to a “near-real time product of high quality”.
The Home Office asked for people with experience of directly leading large-scale IT service operations in a multi-supplier, multi-business environment, and said they should be from an operational delivery role – not an account management of business relationship one.
They will report to director of live services Peter Rose, who was appointed to his position in February this year to oversee the management and operation of the department’s live technology services.
His organisation has 450 staff and a running cost of £250m a year, while the broader Digital, Data and Technology function at the Home Office has around 1,700 staff, along with a large number of suppliers.
The closing date for applications is 27 January, with psychological assessments and briefing sessions to be held from 24 February.
