Principal accountabilities

1. Build, lead and manage the in-house architecture and applications function: recruiting to key posts, upskilling existing teams and developing skills and competencies; and creating the working methods, standards and governance needed for a professional enterprise architecture and application management service.

2. Set and own architecture principles, standards, patterns, guardrails and design authorities for technology across the Council, ensuring that all technology is aligned to agreed strategy, security, resilience, operability and value-for-money requirements.

3. Oversee the full lifecycle ownership of major line-of-business systems, including application strategy, supplier engagement, contracts, upgrades, support arrangements, configuration, technical debt reduction and planned change.

4. Acting as the Council’s foremost architecture expert, provide expert architectural advice, assurance and challenge to programmes, projects, procurements and service areas, translating business need into practical technical options and ensuring traceability from requirements through to solution design.

5. Accountable for devising and maintaining the council’s application roadmaps, ensuring a coherent target state for systems, infrastructure, cloud services, data flows and interfaces across the organisation, and partnering with senior stakeholders to ensure these meet business needs.

6. Accountable for technical due diligence and architecture input to major procurements, renewals and supplier negotiations, ensuring that contracts, designs

and service models protect the council’s long-term interests and technical sovereignty.

7. Ensure that the applications portfolio directly supports business efficiency, actively minimizing technical debt and eliminating functional duplication across directorates,

8. Collaborate with the Head of Cyber Security & Risk to ensure that all deployed systems, improvements and architectural choices are secure by design, compliant and pass appropriate standards of cyber security and information governance.

9. Chair the Technical Design Authority, identifying and managing risks and representing the needs of applications and architecture on boards and other governance functions as required.

10. Deputise for the Director of Digital Innovation as required, both for normal cover and as a point of escalation and authority in a crisis or emergency.