Skills the Irish Government CIO uses to advance digital transformation

In his eight-year tenure as CIO at Ireland’s Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, Barry Lowry always had a vision of what digital government could look like. Here, he details how an approach built on transparency and innovation is continuously tested by EU regulations, US cloud providers, and politicians who want quick wins.

By the time he took up the CIO role in 2016, Lowry had already formed a leadership style more carrot than stick. Working in the British public sector, he’d seen a digitalization program fail because of command-and-control management, where gains achieved by a highly centralized approach quickly unravelled when the civil servant at the helm moved on.

“All the big departments were bullied in a certain direction and it collapsed when he was no longer there. They pushed back and reclaimed lost ground,” says Lowry, who took the lessons onboard and made building alliances his focus. So when he started working on the first digital strategy for the Irish Government, he went for a collegiate-based approach to encourage a shared vision of cross-department co-operation and teamwork. To win stakeholders over, it took patiently explaining each initiative since it was clear to Lowry the concept of digital government would only work with shared data and joined-up thinking — a big challenge in the public sector where departments and agencies often operate in silos.  

Some steps forward have been painfully slow, however. He met with resistance from politicians when plans for a public services card and a public sector data center seemed to intersect with politically sensitive issues, privacy rights, and the path to net zero. Undeterred, he slowly won the argument, with one minister flipping to become an advocate for both initiatives when he better understood the plans.

Yet privacy activists remained opposed to the public services card, arguing that citizens who change their address should be able to decide which government bodies to tell, while the European model, which Ireland signed up to, is a once-only approach. “We join up your data in the background, because that’s what good public services look like,” says Lowry. “I spent a lot of time fighting battles, notably with Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, who was much more attracted to the privacy arguments than the government arguments. But we got through all that successfully.”

Legislating for data sharing 

Lowry considers the 2019 Data Sharing Governance Act his biggest achievement as CIO. Because the Irish government was set up as several legal entities, each with its own data structures and ways of working, a change in the law was needed to advance digital transformation.

The Act is compliant with GDPR, which was crucial to provide the legal basis for public bodies to share data. “It helped make the noise go away about the murky use of data by governments,” he says. “Every data-sharing agreement goes out to public consultation and then it’s published. It’s fully transparent.”

Another big win came during the pandemic in 2020 with the launch of a government app that combined a COVID tracker service with the digital vaccination certificate. “Both of those were specifically called out by Bloomberg,” he says. “They did a review of the worldwide response to COVID and lauded Ireland as the best response in terms of how technology was used.”

Overseen by Lowry, the development of the app showcased the public sector’s ability to deliver a digital service just as effectively as the private sector. His office had already notched up a major success with MyGovID, a public services portal that proves the value of his data-sharing strategy with backend complexity hidden behind a user-friendly interface, which has encouraged 80% of adult Irish citizens to sign up for a range of services.

The next move in citizen engagement will be a digital wallet. Scheduled for an end-of-year launch, it can store a number of credentials on a mobile phone, including a digital driving license and an age card for over-18s. The age ID will show a QR code but no name or address, tackling privacy concerns that have so far prevented Ireland, like the UK, from launching a national identity card.

Running a three-circle strategy

Digitalization of public services is one circle in Lowry’s three-circle strategy plan. The other two are ensuring regulatory compliance and scoring quick wins, which will strike a chord with any CIO who’s achieved buy-in for a long-term strategy by delivering short-term successes. It’s more heightened in Lowry’s world, though, where politicians want to show they make a difference before the next election comes around.

“If you want to keep politicians on board, you’ve got to build outcomes,” he says. “The old way of doing things, when you said that in seven years the project would be ready, is of no interest. So, we do agile, we move fast, we do prototypes, and move into ‘live running’ as quickly as possible.”

Quick wins are important but can’t waver from the bigger plan. An online national childcare scheme, for example, was developed with a proprietary login system proposed by the vendor. But it was rejected by Lowry’s office, which insisted that the system use the MyGovID login. The assistant secretary standing over the project had to be persuaded that would be an easier way for people to engage, but she got it straight away and ended up building the system faster.

Government departments are given some autonomy in the pursuit of digital transformation, but bigger projects must always be signed off by Lowry’s office. Not just a way to keep everyone aligned on strategy, it’s a safety net to avoid IT disasters that make the wrong kind of headlines and waste taxpayer money.

“We put a team of experts in and if they feel a project is veering towards the red, the chair will write a note of concern to me. I meet the sponsors and the department or agency concerned and remediation occurs,” says Lowry. “Most projects actually fail because of lack of senior engagement, so if you can reinvigorate the senior engagement, you’re very likely to get a project back on the rails.”

Leading in digital government

Another complexity in the CIO role is the Irish state’s engagement with hyperscale cloud providers. In 2019, Lowry’s office published an advisory document that encouraged the government to use public cloud services. Knowing that cloud would be a vital component in digital transformation, he wanted to lower barriers to adoption when the model made sense. To advance plans further, he set about developing a public cloud procurement framework, a quick way for departments to run a tender between pre-approved cloud providers, but a request for participants unearthed more regulatory challenges.

The plan was scuppered at the last minute because AWS and Microsoft Azure couldn’t accept the terms and conditions. The problem stemmed from hyperscalers operating under the US Cloud Act, which gives US courts jurisdiction over an entity where data is being sought — a piece of legalese that’s supposed to supersede other legislation, but EU rules say that no law takes precedent over GDPR.

The impasse is made more complex because corporation tax receipts from US tech companies make an enormous contribution to the Irish economy. The prospect of falling out with US companies that have invested heavily in Ireland makes politicians nervous, but the risk of confidential information about Irish citizens surfacing in another jurisdiction is equally onerous. “We’re caught between a rock and a hard place,” says Lowry. “It’ll slow us down a little, but we’re in discussions with Microsoft and AWS about how we can repair this.”

It’s a small dent in Ireland’s progress to becoming a leader in digital government. The country’s EU Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) ranking in digital public services rose from 10th in 2019 to sixth in 2022, and Lowry is confident he’ll get 90% of applicable services consumed online by 2030.

Another crowning achievement, and the secret of Ireland’s progress to date, is his success in changing a culture, a challenge in every business that’s compounded in the risk-adverse public sector. After the success of the COVID app, however, Lowry detected forward momentum among his colleagues, a new-found confidence, and an appetite to achieve more.

When he talks of the two types of civil servant, he could be talking about employees in any organization facing change. “There are those who are afraid of the pace of transformation, and there are those who are invigorated by it,” he says. “You hopefully get enough of the latter that you can persuade the former it’s going to be all right. We’ve now got to the point where we’re all on the same team working with a common vision.”

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