Key Responsibilities

Offer and solution development

• Offer Strategy: Develop, enhance, and continually evolve our offer strategy and solutions for our support to senior political leaders on topics of digital government, digital transformation, digital public services, working collaboratively with other senior experts to seamlessly integrate various aspects of digital transformation (e.g. Digital Identity, National Digital Infrastructure, Data for decision making, AI, etc.) into a comprehensive offer for Governments.
• Tech Solution Development: Maintain relentless focus on developing practical, implementable solutions, tools, frameworks, and models which enable and enhance our teams’ delivery. Proactively identify and translate insights from upcoming trends to generate new solutions to enhance our support to senior political leaders for digital transformation and digital public services. Contribute to the establishment of partnerships with private vendors for the co-development of tech solutions to address the needs of our clients.
• Best Practices: Galvanise the collection and sharing of lessons and best practices from across the portfolio and draw on and represent evolving global best practice leveraging your network and knowledge and working with Policy & Politics (P&P).  
• Subject matter expertise in client service
• Client Service: 70% of time dedicated to advancing client service priorities, ensuring we are bringing the best of TBI in digital government and service design and delivery.
• Work collaboratively with regional and country leadership and their teams. Draw in and foster strong linkages between advisory, partnerships and policy work.
• Scoping and opportunity development: identify opportunities, propose solutions to senior political leader priorities to improve public service and the functioning of government, generate innovative solutions to client problems, and frame them in a compelling way.
• Delivery:  Support teams to create viable project designs, delivery plans, as well as identify risks and challenges to implementation including digital readiness assessments, and suitable Government enterprise architectures.
• Government Relations: Support strengthening of client and senior government relationships as a trusted and reliable expert advisor in line with project strategies.
• Internal leadership
• Internal Communications: support the Director for Government Innovation and AI to effectively capture and cascade key developments, successes, and learnings from our portfolio of work to inform the development of TBI tech offer in line with clients evolving needs and demands.
• Demand and Offer: Represent aggregate client need and opportunities to wider institute to enable key stakeholders to work towards both client and institute priorities.
• Learning and Development: support the training and enablement of TBI country teams and wider institute to understand our offer and utilise tools and best practices to improve capacity and impact of our work.
• Products development: work closely with the AI Incubator to ensure that products development responds to clients’ demands and leads to products that can be scaled.
• External engagement and partnerships
• Thought leadership: Provide senior-level representation as a global subject matter expert, including presentations, for TBI at strategic, high-profile external fora and events.  
• Partnerships: contribute to develop and enhance our network with the private sector, leading innovators and implementation partners in the digital government space for wider client impact.
• Business development: Bring subject matter expertise to conversations with key donors, clients, and income opportunities as required to support TBI financial health. 

Person Specification

• Significant experience in government, or government advisory, related to digital transformation and delivery of digital government and innovative public services design and delivery.
• Experience in developing and implementing a digital government strategy, or driving digitalization efforts in the public sector, or establishing a vision and framework to leverage data and technology to innovate service design and delivery (e.g., fostering data interoperability for sharing and reuse, adopting UX service design).
• Familiarity with the policies and regulations needed to foster and enable technology deployment and adoption in the public sector and ability to make recommendations and propose specific solutions to senior political leaders to ensure safeguard in the interest of the public good (e.g., data privacy, data sovereignty).
• Experience in identification of project opportunities and strategy development, preferably in the tech sector, or linked to government advisory.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with a wide range of government and non-government actors, including the private sector and development partners.
• Excellent communicator able to effectively convey complex or technical topics to senior political leaders or nontechnical parties.
• Bold thinker equipped to be a thought partner and peer to cutting-edge technology companies as well as government leaders to think towards the future of innovation.
• Able to work independently whilst drawing on expertise from colleagues globally.
• Outstanding management skills and the proven ability to inspire teams to achieve exceptional objectives and contribute directly to outcomes hands-on
• Experience in developing and emerging economies, and sensitivity to a diverse range of cultural and regional norms.
• Excellent collaboration skills and strong team-player mindset.
• Strong diplomatic skills

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Key Responsibilities 

This is a senior role within TBI and will be held by an exceptional candidate with deep and extensive experience in government advisory and technology-enabled transformation and delivery. 

Offer development and thought leadership 

• Lead the development and evolution of TBI’s national digital Infrastructure offer strategy which defines our approach to supporting countries to develop and invest in the infrastructure backbone of a digital government and economy. 
• Identify and apply emerging trends and opportunities for digital infrastructure and keep us on the forefront of disruptive technology innovation, working in collaboration with the Tech Policy (PP) team to support their research and publication pipeline. 
• Develop internal frameworks, guides, tools, playbooks, and documents which effectively capture our offer and solutions and enable team usage adding scalability to your expert advice and input 

Technical leadership and expert support 

• Generate cohesion across our technology advisory work, capture lessons learned, and develop best practices to inform future efforts, working closely with the other GCS experts and sectoral leads and our new Global Director of Innovation. 
• Provide hands-on technical input and thought partnership to country teams in the scoping, design and delivery of digital infrastructure initiatives, (including supporting infrastructure landscape assessments and other enabling efforts) generating creative solutions, and framing them in a compelling way 
• Support country directors and teams to effectively consider, assess, and pursue national digital infrastructure initiatives as part of TBI country strategies in response to government demand or propositional solutions. 
• Quality Assure, support and troubleshoot the implementation of national digital infrastructure initiatives working collaboratively to ensure impact and that country teams can access the best of the Institute to support their work. 
• Develop, and quality assure high-calibre external facing proposal documents and deliverables working with country teams. 
• Support country teams to maintain effective and trusted government relationships which enable our delivery of cloud solutions and other digital infrastructure. Where required develop relationships with relevant country counterparts and stakeholders (e.g. ICT Ministers). 
• Provide expert input support to country teams as needed with government counterparts, 
• e.g. joining and leading workshops as an expert. Provide ongoing support to resolve strategic questions as they emerge during implementation. 

External engagement and partnerships 

• Develop and enhance our network, relationships, and partnership with leading innovators, technology companies, implementation partners, and thought leaders in the digital infrastructure space (cloud, internet, telcos) which enhance our understanding of emerging innovation and improve our offer and advise to governments 
• Represent TBI at a senior level in external conversations, forums, and partnerships 
• Lead engagements with existing and future strategic partners for Cloud Infrastructure and Internet Access, in collaboration with relevant parts of TBI.
• With Strategic Partnerships and Initiatives team, support joint strategy and partnership governance, escalating challenges when needed. 
• Support joint opportunity development for digital infrastructure solutions with our external partners and technology companies. 
• Engage with relevant external stakeholders such as other not-for-profit organisations, donors, media, suppliers, and agencies. 

Enabling Systems 

• Ensure, and support the development of, training materials and collateral to ensure TBI country teams and government counterparts understand the specifics and value addition of various digital infrastructure solutions and offers 
• Work closely with our Impact team to contribute to a learning culture which effectively captures and utilises lessons to continuously improve our work. 
• Support country and regional teams as needed to attract and hire, leading talent in support of our work, contributing to the recruit, induction and support for new hires and mentoring and coaching where needed. 
• Shape and embody a positive culture that drives innovation and delivery. Play a key role in the broader community at TBI and will be expected to build strong working relationships 

Person Specification 

• With substantial relevant experience in governments, government or technology advisory 
• Who is considered an expert and thought leader in digital infrastructure, with experience designing or leading digital transformation efforts in government 
• Who has experience in and understands public service and government functional priorities and challenges in emerging economies, with experience in Africa, Eastern Europe, and/or Asia 
• With demonstrable experience in technology enterprises or programmes 
• Who is strategic, entrepreneurial, pragmatically optimistic and can challenge the status-quo and develop plans for successful delivery of challenging, ambitious objectives 
• With outstanding management and strategy skills — able to set strategic direction, inspire teams to collaboratively achieve exceptional objectives, and not afraid to be hands-on to achieve results 
• Who has a record of accomplishment cultivating and maintaining strategic alliances and partnerships across public, social, and private sector organisations 
• Who is a skilled communicator and influencer, from executive office level through to technical level, is adept at speaking to senior leadership 
• Adept at navigating ambiguous environments and is comfortable in a rapid growth environment and at managing up and beyond hierarchy 
• Who is comfortable speaking in public forums and representing the institute on the global stage 
• Who has worked or consulted in a range developing and emerging economies and is sensitive to a diverse range of cultural and regional norms, and fosters a positive spirit of collaboration 
• Experience engaging or working on public policy as an enabler of digital transformation (e.g. data sovereignty and privacy) 
• Who commits to business objectives and pulls out the stops to make sure they are always met 
• Comfortable to travel about 20- 30% of the time to global locations.