Central department advertises role offering salary of up to £118k and remit to work with five clusters of departments to ensure successful delivery of multibillion pound programme to standardise tech

The Cabinet Office is advertising a senior leadership role for a technical expert to support departments in delivering government’s ongoing multibillion-pound shared services rollout.

The post as deputy director of shared service design and analysis comes with a remit to “lead an expert team of technical shared service specialists and play a lead role in supporting clusters to design and implement their new shared service centres and business process support”.

There are five such clusters, each of which will see multiple departments standardise on a single back-office software infrastructure, incorporating the likes of finance and HR tools. Several clusters have already been to market seeking supplier partners – including software publishers and systems integrators to support delivery – to fulfil contracts set to be worth hundreds of millions of pounds over the next 10 to 15 years.

The design and analysis chief will spearhead a central team tasked with “working collaboratively with departments, clusters and functions”.

This will include engaging “closely with clusters engaged in in-flight migrations to cloud platforms, to support them in taking advantage of best practice implementation approaches and technology, to enable successful delivery”.

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The Shared Services for Government team – which operates as a directorate within the Cabinet Office-based Government People Group – will also be expected to “horizon scan across the technical and business service provider sector to provide insights to support successful deliver”, as well as supporting efforts to “drive synchronised data and standards across clusters”.

The deputy director role, which comes with a salary of up to £117,800, will be based in one or more of the Cabinet Office’s locations in Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and York.

“The Shared Services for Government Strategy will transform and modernise the back office of government,” the job advert says. “It brings together 18 different departments, and dozens of arm’s-length bodies, into five clusters to replace around 200 departmental-based legacy IT systems with five modern, user-friendly, cloud-based systems. It will deliver smarter, cheaper, faster systems and processes to create a synchronised civil service, providing value and efficiency, process and common data standards and methodology. It will harness modern technology to deliver value for the taxpayer and improved experience for users. By standardising data and aligning policy and process across clusters we will improve the level of insight, and information available to government to underpin decision making.”

Applications for the role are open until 11.55pm on 14 January.