A Conversation with Tony Shannon, the Irish Government’s Head of Digital Services
Thought Piece #10 Life Events, Fractal Patterns, and building EU-wide digital solutions from the bottom up
This interview with Tony Shannon, Ireland’s Head of Digital Services, is the exact sort of conversation that interweave.gov was designed for. It highlights the work of a country which, whilst not cited as often as Estonia and Singapore, is nonetheless setting the Europe-wide (and indeed global) gold standard for digital governments.
From life events strategies to continent-wide digital IDs, Shannon offers a host of longtermist solutions that may come to define the next decade of GovTech. Alongside discussion of specific digital initiatives, we also explore theories of change, and how governments can look to the future when constantly buffeted by an age of ‘permacrisis’.
Tony Shannon, the Irish Government’s Head of Digital Services, has a knack for spotting patterns. It is with a discussion of patterns that our interview begins and ends, and it is a theme that extends throughout his work.
Prior to delivering digital services as part of the Chief Information Officer of Ireland’s team, he gathered an online “book of thoughts” on his website, Frectally Speaking. To call it a blog would be unbecoming of hundreds of pages stretching across “healthcare, change, leadership, quality improvement, information systems, standards, and the value of simple rules in a complex world”. There too the idea of patterns forms a common theme – the site’s title alludes to a fractal pattern, ever repeating designs that appear similar at different scales.
It is a useful basis for talking about digital government, particularly in Ireland. The headline statistics are clear: Ireland has one of the fastest growing takeups of eIDs for government services in the world (currently at 38% of the population), and are leaders amongst the EU in open data and digital government infrastructure. But behind these impressive selling points is a philosophy of cumulative gains, where a technical solution developed once might be used across a range of applications.
A Fractal pattern is a useful basis for talking about Digital Government, starting in Ireland
This is perhaps most clear in the government’s approach to life events. The life events strategy aims to support citizens from cradle to grave, using digital building blocks to identify frequently-used processes that are similar across various government services at specific moments in one’s life. These building blocks are not necessarily the services themselves, but the functions underpinning them, digital identity or data collection for example. If digital identity can be captured using a ‘once-only’ principle, where the citizen needs only give their data once, this can then be used to offer proactive services when that person reaches key life milestones (starting school; marriage; or death, for example).
To illustrate this, Shannon tells me about the government’s thoughts on digitalizing the issuance of a birth certificate and travel visa. These are ostensibly two different services: the one issued to a baby born of the nationality of the country they are being registered in; the other to a person of any age traveling from a different country. But the processes are largely similar – a set of information is passed to the government (a data exchange), who decides whether or not to issue a document according to a set of rules, with the document issued then implying entitlements thereafter. Questions of data provenance aside, these apparently distinct processes are from a technical perspective opportunities for a common solution.
Examining data’s provenance, that is to say ensuring its validity, is a process that can be digitalized too according to the notion of self-sovereign identity. Today, when a prospective customer goes to a bank to open an account, they might be asked to provide a birth certificate (issued by a government). Once provided, through a ‘triangle of trust’ the bank is able to check the validity of the document with the government against a set of rules, and then either allow the customer to open an account or not. With an approach akin to Ireland’s life events, which aims to create a digital chain of documents throughout a user’s life, this process need not be a manual one. In fact, banks (or whoever else a user might allow permission to do so) will be able to check information quickly, transparently, and efficiently.
Spotting Patterns at a National and Transnational Level
The Irish government is a champion of the GovStack initiative, which aims to build open-source ‘building blocks’ to support governments around the world in accelerating the development of digital services (interweave.gov spoke to Yolanda Martinez, the UN ITU’s lead on GovStack, back in December). But Ireland is also an EU Member State, and one of its leading lights in terms of EU-wide digital priorities such as the adoption of eIDs. I ask Shannon, in light of Ireland’s success, what impact one member state can have in supporting the roll out of digital services across the continent.
The answer is “quite a lot”. Shannon points to two key concepts in management theory: top-down approaches, where decisions are made by those at the top of the hierarchy and filtered down; and bottom up approaches, which empower those lower down in an organization. At an EU-level, there is room for both. Two of the bloc’s digital government priorities are the Single Digital Gateway and the Digital Wallet, which will allow all EU citizens access to a set of online services in each member state, as well as facilitating digital document sharing across the bloc. While these directives are set in a top-down way from Brussels, Shannon argues that it is the role of individual member states to work over a series of years to implement them from the ground up.
For Ireland, this would mean amplifying national level successes across the continent. Life events building blocks might be ‘hooked into’ the digital gateway and wallet for example, meaning that the sharing of documents across member states happens in a proactive and digitalized way.
Creating a Long-Termist Digitalization View
Bold visions of pan-European life events strategies and data sharing are easier dreamt of than achieved. If negotiating the different rules and protocols required to take digital services from a member-state to an EU-wide level is not a daunting enough prospect, there is also the question of timeframes. In a European political context, where member states’ parliamentary terms rarely last more than five years, it can be difficult to build a decade-long strategic momentum. Often, a governments’ desire for quick wins can sometimes come at the expense of long-term gains.
Indeed, building any sort of long-term strategy into government organizations can be difficult. Before working for the Irish government, Shannon spent much of his career as a doctor, first in Ireland and then in the UK’s National Health Service. The latter in particular is not an organization with the luxury to think about long timeframes: public satisfaction in the NHS is today on par with the 1990s, when then- leader of the opposition Tony Blair told voters they had 24 hours to save the organization. Even without the strain of Covid-19, voters demand the reduction of Accident & Emergency and GP wait times in the short term, not the long.
This is where the cumulative benefit of services comes in. As a final note, Shannon gives the example of a child applying for a secondary school. Currently, there is no centralized system in Ireland for doing so. Parents must send out documentation to a variety of schools in the local area, who will then accept children based on availability and the proximity of the child’s home to the school.
Within a life service system, the government would be able to automatically provide the schools with a child’s birth certificate and address at an appropriate time. Rather than placing the onus on parents to fill out a host of forms, schools could then proactively reach out to families once the child is of an appropriate age. Each component part of that service – the digitization of documents, the data sharing from government to schools, and the proactive communication with families – is a ‘quick win’ that improves the efficiency of government. But the big picture, a vision of Ireland with more than 90% of applicable services fundamentally redesigned to be consumed online by 2030, is more than the sum of its building block parts.