Chief Innovation Officer (Program Manager IV) - 60027638

Full Job Description

The mission of the South Carolina Department of Education is to serve students, support teachers, empower parents, and engage the community so that every student graduates prepared to reach their full potential.

Job Purpose:

The South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE) is seeking a Chief Innovation Officer (CInO) to serve as a member of the Executive Leadership Team.

This role is responsible for shaping, integrating, and advancing the technical, data, and innovation infrastructure required for SCDE to modernize at scale and lead nationally.

The Chief Innovation Officer will focus on turning deep technical expertise into sustained agency-wide capability, ensuring that SCDE’s systems, people, processes, and policies work together to support high-impact initiatives over time.

This role exists to connect vision to execution, strategy to infrastructure, and innovation to durable operations, particularly those involving data, technology, and cross-agency integration.

Responsibilities:

Enterprise Innovation & Technical Strategy

• Define and steward SCDE’s enterprise innovation and technical strategy in alignment with the agency’s North Star goals and strategic plan.
• Ensure technology investments reinforce one another rather than operate as isolated solutions.
• Translate emerging national best practices into practical, scalable state systems.
• Oversee enterprise architecture to ensure technical coherence, interoperability, and sustainability across agency initiatives.

Strategic Guidance & Integration of Enterprise Initiatives

• Provide strategic guidance across SCDE’s major X-Teams, including but not limited to:
  1. Growing Pathways for Students (GPS)
  2. Accountability & State Report Card
  3. Education Scholarship Trust Fund (ESTF) Operations
  4. Accelerated Instruction & Motivation
  5. Special Education
  6. Civics Standards & Curriculum
  7. Shared Services
  8. Career Pathways
  9. District Funding Formulas
  10. Education Technology
• Ensure teams align on technical architecture, data standards, governance models, security requirements, and implementation of roadmaps to enable coordinated execution.

Data, Digital Infrastructure & Systems Modernization Stewardship

• Guide the evolution of GPS, SCDE’s statewide K–12 decision-support and analytics platform, ensuring it remains secure, interoperable, and instructionally meaningful.
• Lead the strategic development of a digital career pathways and credentialing ecosystem, enabling learners’ skills, credentials, and accomplishments to be portable, verifiable, and actionable across education and workforce systems.
• Ensure alignment with national interoperability standards and emerging federal and philanthropic initiatives.
• Lead enterprise-wide efforts that integrate data analytics and innovative practices to improve policy development, operational decisions, and student outcomes.

Organizational Capacity Building

• Build internal capacity by providing input into:
  1. Technical roles, teams, and talent development
  2. Governance models
  3. Sustainable operating processes
• Help SCDE move from reliance on individual expertise to shared, institutional capability.

Executive Collaboration & External Leadership

• Serve as a trusted strategic advisor to the Superintendent and Executive Team.
• Represent SCDE in national innovation, data, and workforce-aligned education conversations.
• Cultivate partnerships with other states, federal agencies, philanthropy, and technical organizations.

This position is located in the Division of Agency Operations.

Requirements

A bachelor's degree and relevant program management experience.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience leading large-scale data systems, enterprise technology strategy, or innovation initiatives in complex organizations.
• Proven ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable strategies that drive organizational execution.
• Demonstrated comfort operating at the intersection of policy, practice, technology, and people, with the ability to align a variety of stakeholders.
• Strong track record of designing, building, and sustaining systems that endure beyond initial launch and scale effectively over time.

Additional Information

ONLY THOSE APPLICANTS CHOSEN FOR AN INTERVIEW WILL BE NOTIFIED BY LETTER THAT THE POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED.

http://www.ed.sc.gov/jobs/human-resources/title-ix-nondiscrimination/