Associate Data Governance Manager - ONS - HEO

Location

The ONS operates a flexible hybrid working model across the UK, with colleagues linked to one of our contractual locations working between office and remote throughout the week. The locations for this role are Newport, Titchfield (Fareham) and Manchester.

All colleagues are required to work from their contractually allocated site for at least 40% of their working time.

The induction process for the role will be conducted in person.

About the job

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.

The role of the Associate Data Governance Manger is to acquire and manage the supply of administrative and/or commercial data for the functions of the Office for National Statistics including, but not limited to: the transformation of key ONS programmes; Census; Economic Statistics; Surveys; and making data available across government and externally for research in the public good through Trusted Research Environments and supporting the Devolved Governments with access to data for their own statistical and research needs.

You will also be responsible for the implementation of the ONS data strategy, either through having a direct lead on implementation, or through linking areas of your work to the outcomes of the strategy, including developing and contributing to an end-to-end data governance framework (the processes, operational policies and standards needed to support data management) and ensuring that the organisation can demonstrate standards for data governance accreditation.

Job description

The Data Acquisition Division supports ONS, Government and Academic analysts answer the questions of the day by working with data partners to negotiate and enable access to sustainable data sources, putting in place, maintaining and managing data governance frameworks for safe data sharing and usage, and implementing and supporting the data strategy.

It involves understanding and consolidating analysts’ requirements for producing and developing their statistics, matching these with the available data, negotiating access to these data for statistical and research purposes, and making tactical recommendations on the creation of data assets. Successful delivery will put in place robust processes and documentation, working closely across Data Acquisition, the directorate and the rest of the organisation.

It also involves implementing the data strategy both directly and indirectly, ensuring that all Data Acquisition activity contributes to the wider aims of the Office for National Statistics. Ensuring and demonstrating compliance with Data Governance frameworks, standards and accreditations.

Data Acquisition lead and support on the negotiation and development of agreements with external parties and enable bringing these data into ONS, working to deliver mature data governance processes that deliver sustainable data for ONS’ needs.

You will apply relevant data and ethical frameworks and standards to your work, understanding data governance good practice. Specifically, providing advice to users on the technical, ethical, data protection and security, and legal aspects (e.g. GDPR) of using administrative data, and the benefits of using it. 

You will be able to grasp economic and social statistical concepts quickly, identifying common needs for administrative data and communicating appropriately and clearly between technical and non-technical audiences.

You will understand data and how they can be prepared for, and used in, statistics and research and how they can benefit policy and decision making, as well as understanding the economy and society better. You will need to build and demonstrate a good understanding of administrative data and how it is used in the production of official statistics and research.

Responsibilities 

• Support the process of capturing stakeholder needs, assessing, defining and justifying those needs to arrive at a definitive set of user requirements that are reflected in the required documentation. 
• Support the stakeholder engagement activity of acquisitions within your remit.
• Support the preparation of documentation for data sharing and governance, for example memorandums of understanding and business cases, and play an instrumental role in standardising this documentation.
• Develop a good understanding and application of data sharing legislation to get maximum return for ONS.
• Have a broad understanding of data use and be able to explain this to a non-technical audience.
• Identify, understand and communicate factors that influence and shape data and present in a way appropriate to the audience.
• Maximise the use of administrative data for statistics through your understanding of the value of these data, including what is already available to use in ONS and what the wider landscape of data can provide.
• Develop and maintain the data acquisition project plan to capture all requirements, deliverables and risks that are associated with the project.
• Proactively identify your own development needs, ensuring that you deliver your responsibilities to the highest possible standard.
• Contribute to activity that benefits the strategic aims of the division or directorate, ensuring it is the best possible place to work.

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Communicating between the technical and the non-technical (Working) - Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, support and host discussions within a multidisciplinary team, with potentially difficult dynamics, be an advocate for the team externally and manage differing stakeholder perspectives.
• Data Life Cycle (Working) - Understand and apply data governance over a data life cycle, ensuring best practice at each phase.
• Data literacy improvement (Working) - Raise awareness of the need for data literacy within the organisation, support data literacy training and development by enabling data consumers to understand what they can and cannot do with data.
• Data management (Working) - Follow organisational data governance, including policies on data access, sharing, dissemination and protection, participate in or deliver data management across services or products, use appropriate data management tools, procedures and methods with some support.
• Stakeholder relationship management (Awareness) - Describe who your stakeholders are and the importance of managing relationships with them, explain what your stakeholders find important and why.

Behaviours

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

• Communicating and Influencing
• Working Together
• Delivering at Pace
• Managing a Quality Service