Transform Gov - the digital government podcast

Every new policy asks people to do something differently, but training is often treated as a mere afterthough, taking place after rollout. So what if we flipped the process? What if we treated learning as an essential, so policy actually changes what happens on the ground?

In this episode, we speak with Gavin Woods, Managing Director of Aurion Learning, who has spent almost 26 years helping government departments, agencies and public bodies turn policy into practice through digital learning.

What you can take from this episode:
🔹 Bring learning into the room where the policy is written: The organisations that win awards for delivery plan training alongside the policy, not after it. One recent client saw 98% of its audience complete the compliance training required.
🔹 Check your own language, and ask your audience what they need: Teams working intensely on policy can become "a little bit obsessed with our own plans and our own language", using terms their audience doesn't understand.
🔹 Look beyond the tip of the iceberg: The people already engaged with you aren't your whole audience. Where you can't simply tell people to complete training, work out what's in it for them, and design for learning rather than just information sharing.
🔹 Ask who is accountable for the policy's success, not just who runs training: Heads of strategy, transformation and sector skills increasingly need to be part of the conversation.
🔹 Build a one-stop shop for AI upskilling: A learning portal with approved tools, internal guidance and colleague case studies helps turn "is this here to take my job?" into confidence.
🔹 Don't mistake speed for quality: "Fast and bad is still bad." Ask what people need to know, what's difficult and what they ask most often, then pick the right format, from e-learning to a printable job aid.

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.

#TransformGov #PublicSector #Learning #PolicyImplementation #AI
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Recorded live at the All-Ireland Clinical AI Congress in Belfield, this episode features Dr Amrita Kumar, Radiology and AI Clinical Lead at Medica and a consultant breast radiologist who has built hospital-wide AI implementation from scratch — first in the NHS, now in the UAE.

What you can take from this episode:
🔹 Don't rush to a pilot — set up governance first. Dr Kumar discovered her hospital's departments were each adopting AI in isolation; the fix was getting every stakeholder (data governance, IT, digital, clinical teams) around one table from the start, not cascading through them one by one.
🔹 Build a short, clear pitch for executive buy-in — and let leadership do the cascading. A five-slide deck and one meeting with her CEO was enough to unlock introductions to every other stakeholder needed.
🔹 Secure funding through research partnerships before real-world rollout. Partnering on national research projects built internal infrastructure and expertise while bringing in funding, well before any live implementation began.
🔹 Design one consistent governance and evaluation framework, even across different vendors and workflows. The same setup, evaluation, and monitoring approach was successfully scaled across five hospitals using different AI tools for different tasks.
🔹 Watch for automation bias, and build in permanent checks. Less experienced clinicians' agreement with AI shifted measurably over time — the fix includes periodic "no AI" reporting sessions and training staff to read confidence scores, not just flagged regions.
🔹 Know where AI genuinely helps today. With roughly 90% of scans normal, AI's clearest current value is confidently triaging those cases so limited specialist time goes to the 10% that need it.

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.
📅 The Ireland eGovernment Awards and Leadership Summit take place 24 September at O'Reilly Hall, UCD. Find out more at digitalgovawards.com
#TransformGov #AI #Healthcare #DigitalTransformation #PublicSector
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Ireland is about to spend €275 billion on infrastructure with a workforce that's already stretched. So what is the difference between AI as a nice-to-have productivity tool, and AI as the thing that actually closes the gap between what we need to deliver and the people we have to deliver it?

Stephen Bradley and João Silva from Accenture return to go deeper: not just what goes wrong on infrastructure projects, but exactly where AI changes the picture — and where to start if you're leading a major procurement tomorrow.

What you can take from this episode:

🔹 Sort your data foundation before you scale AI on top of it. It’s fundamental to figure out your work breakdown structures, cost breakdown structures, and what historical data is worth cleansing. If you get this wrong and "you'll spend the next 10 years doing data cleansing" instead of delivering.
🔹 Understand the three layers AI actually adds: AI has three layers in a project – Assistance (roughly 50% productivity gains on individual tasks), orchestration (real-time triangulation across a whole project), and assurance (AI-supported checks that direct human reviewers to where their judgement matters most).
🔹 Start small, prove it, then scale. Pick use cases where your data is already credible, demonstrate success, and expand from there.
🔹 Reframe the skills conversation. The problem is that there are too many jobs, and not enough people. AI is a capability multiplier for a workforce already in short supply, rather than a threat in and of itself.
🔹 Take humans out of harm's way wherever you physically can. Remote monitoring and AI-assisted inspection means real risk reduction. Every person you don't have to send onto a live rail line or a fast road is one less risk.

Missed Part 1? Catch Stephen and João's earlier conversation on why infrastructure projects overrun, and Ireland's skills gap.

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.

📅 The Ireland eGovernment Awards and Leadership Summit take place 24 September at O'Reilly Hall, UCD. Find out more at digitalgovawards.com

#TransformGov #Infrastructure #PublicSector #AI #DigitalTransformation
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Ireland has committed €275 billion to infrastructure by 2035. Globally, 9 out of 10 major projects fail to deliver on plan, scope, or budget. What goes wrong, and can Ireland beat the odds using AI, digitisation and know-how?

In Part 1 of this special two-part podcast series, host Maeve Kneafsey speaks with Stephen Bradley, lead author of Accenture's research into Ireland's infrastructure delivery challenges, and João Silva, Accenture’s managing director of capital projects.

What you can take from this episode:

🔹 How do you map your project's interfaces: A UK rail electrification project's cost grew tenfold after a value-engineering decision wasn't properly assessed against its knock-on effects — a decision that should have taken a day instead played out over a decade.
🔹 How to face the skills gap honestly: Delivering Ireland's National Development Plan at current productivity would need roughly 100,000 additional construction practitioners — equivalent to two years of all net migration into the country.
🔹 Why you need to rethink procurement before you launch: Moving from a "passive buyer" to an "engaged system orchestrator" means defining your data standards before contractors are appointed, not after.
🔹 How to watch for over-engineering: It often reflects genuine caution around safety on novel assets — understanding why it happens is the first step to managing it.
🔹 Why you should communicate progress early and often: Projects that published clear timelines and used digital twins to show the public visible progress built trust that made delivery easier, not harder.

Part 2 goes deeper on exactly how AI and digital tools can change infrastructure delivery in practice.

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.

📅 The Ireland eGovernment Awards and Leadership Summit take place 24 September at O'Reilly Hall, UCD. Find out more at digitalgovawards.com

#TransformGov #Infrastructure #PublicSector #AI #DigitalTransformation
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Could Irish Rail have saved the State €16.5 million, and got a working traffic management system, if its project had been managed differently?

Today, guest James Louttit — Founder and Lead Trainer at Impactful Project Management — argues that successful projects come down to some surprisingly simple disciplines: focus on value, prioritise needs, make risk visible, force governance to make decisions, and adapt rather than blindly following a plan-for-plans-sake.

So, could applying those principles earlier have changed the outcome at Irish Rail?

That’s one of the questions we’re asking today on Transform Gov.

James takes us inside:
🔹How to get a project funded: focus on how many citizens benefit, how much time is saved, and how much risk is taken out
🔹Why MoSCoW can collapse into chaos: when everything becomes a “must”, nothing is really prioritised, and force-ranking is a better way to make hard choices
🔹Stopping project risk becoming tomorrow’s headline: The risk-specific contingency method for putting a real cost on what could go wrong before it happens
🔹Pawpaws versus prickly pears: a brilliantly simple way to spot the work that delivers big value for little effort, and the work that eats time, money and energy for very little return
🔹When an AI sceptic changed his mind: how a civil servant, given a real task and Microsoft Copilot, turned resistance into enthusiasm in a matter of minutes

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.

📅 The Ireland eGovernment Awards and Leadership Summit take place 24 September at O'Reilly Hall, UCD. Find out more at digitalgovawards.com

#TransformGov #ProjectManagement #PublicSector #Leadership #AI

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.