Information Commmution Technology Specialist

UNICEF is investing in geospatial data, technology, and talent to drive our emergency response and programme planning. We are positioning this work as a core integration solution that enables our staff to analyze and react to fast-breaking challenges using rapid, high-resolution spatial data combined with more traditional sources such as survey, census, and administrative data.

On the spatial platform side, we are consolidating our investments in commercial solutions, especially ArcGIS, while we simultaneously build community around our open-source Python solution GeoSight. We are also pushing the frontiers for UNICEF, exploring the use of spatial big data with modern data types like H3 and data science platforms like Data Bricks.

From a spatial data perspective, we are brokering access to new sources such as earth observation and mobility data and providing curated foundational spatial data assets like standard administrative boundaries, providing them through dedicated catalogs such as our open-source Python solution GeoRepo.

Building a spatial data community around internal and external partnership is core to how we build our geospatial capacity. Through the Frontier Data Network and its nodes we support geospatial practitioners across UNICEF to scale, reproduce, and industrialize their approaches.

The ideal candidate for this role is a seasoned international geospatial expert who can push geospatial capabilities at UNICEF along all the core dimension of our activities: platforms, data, talent, capacity development, partnership, and community. This is a key leadership role in the rapidly evolving area of spatial data analytics.

Strategically manage the global consolidation and adoption of geospatial platforms:

• Manage the design and implementation of strategic change management mechanisms that move UNICEF offices from legacy and stand-alone solutions to common enterprise and open-source GIS solutions.
• Be responsible for the availability and performance of geospatial platforms.
• Manage the pipeline of feature requests for GIS platforms from a global set of stakeholders, interacting with solutions engineers and engineering leads to help realize those solutions.
• Represent the combined interests of UNICEF geospatial users as a Senior User, also managing acceptance criteria, and ensuring that new features and solutions meet those criteria.
• Lead the administration of users on geospatial platforms through the design and adoption of strategic service desk approaches, training junior staff to triage requests.
• Broker needs of other UNICEF software solution teams to facilitate their access to GIS data and platforms, including design and implementation of APIs.
• Lead the work to connect business intelligence platforms, especially Power BI with geospatial platforms.

Promote the use of geospatial solutions:

• Represent UNICEF at conferences, e.g. Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G).
• Represent UNICEF for standards group like United Nations Global Geospatial Information Management (UNGGIM).
• Organize events for the UNICEF GIS community of practitioners including webinars, brown bags, panels, etc.
• Lead field office capacity development on the use of geospatial data and analytics:
• Advise and help field offices hire qualified geospatial staff and consultants.
• Upskill field office staff through focused field visits based on emergency and humanitarian needs, training them in geospatial platform use.
• Lead development of GIS solutions for field offices, especially in emergency and humanitarian settings.

Lead UNICEF geospatial data responses:

• Build and use inter-agency partnerships to promote shared datasets, especially in emergency and humanitarian settings.
• Manage support to geospatial data analysis, such as Children’s Climate Risk Index and Equity Profiles.
• Lead the standardization of UNICEF spatial data and spatial data standards.
• Manage the curation of core spatial data assets such as administrative boundaries, locations, services, high resolution population maps, etc.
• Lead data managers in the implementation and maintenance of geospatial reference data such as names and codes of administrative boundaries.
• Raise awareness to foster reuse and deduplication of spatial data assets.
• Foster partnerships with public and private spatial data producers to facilitate UNICEF access to external spatial data assets.
• Manage relationships with external GIS vendors.
• Manage and maintain LTAs with external vendors.
• Advise UNICEF stakeholders on the appropriate use of GIS vendors.
• Manage review of vendor outputs.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…

The following minimum requirements:

• Education: An advanced university degree (equivalent to a Master’s) from an accredited institution is required in geospatial, computer science, software engineering, mathematics, or another relevant technical field.

Work Experience:

• At least 8 years of relevant work experience:
• with GIS in a large international organization or corporation.
• managing and implementing IT and GIS data and technology solutions for medium and large-scale organizations, including national statistical offices.
• partnering with internal and external stakeholders across GIS communities and networks to build GIS capacity across data, talent, and technology.
• in GIS product management, representing stakeholders as a senior user, developing product plans, and executing them to develop customer focused tools.
• Familiarity with statistical data concepts, including SDMX.

Source:  https://jobs.unicef.org/cw/en-us/job/570902