Government Digital Transformation Case Study: How Ireland’s Department of Justice Built an Award-Winning Service Without a Big-Bang Tech Rollout

A Transform Gov case study on service design, change management and AI in the public sector

Most government digital transformation stories follow the same script: legacy systems are ripped out, a new platform goes live, and the technology gets the credit. The team behind Bridging Cultures, a multilingual immigration support service at Ireland’s Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, took a different path.

Speaking on the Transform Gov podcast, Paul Rooney (Head of Process, Service Design and Change) and Roshan Wijsinghe (Project Manager) explained how a fragmented, high-volume help desk operation was rebuilt around the people using it, not the systems supporting it.

Key Takeaways

• The project was business-led, not technology-led. Service design and user research came before any platform decision.
• The team built detailed user personas covering digital literacy, native language, and cultural expectations around data privacy.
• Localisation, not just translation: the service supports 14 languages, but the team focused on whether content was genuinely understood, not just translated.
• Change management was owned by the business, using an in-house framework and internal “change champions,” rather than an off-the-shelf model imposed by IT.
• A strict 12-month deadline and Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach protected delivery without sacrificing long-term ambition.
• AI (via Microsoft Dynamics) is used to summarise interactions and speed up onboarding but deliberately excluded from decision-making, keeping human judgment central.

The Problem: Too Many Queries, Too Little Consistency

The catalyst for this project was volume. By 2021, the Department of Justice was fielding an escalating number of queries across citizenship, visa and residency schemes, largely through email-based help desks. Paul explained that the complexity and scale had become unsustainable for staff to manage manually, and customers were left without reliable, timely information.

 

“The volume of requests and the complexity of requests is very challenging for the staff and the operations team to support,” Paul said. “So the ultimate goal was to digitise and make that process more self-service to our customers… but more importantly, to support the operations team internally to provide an improved public service.”

 

According to Paul, a significant share of incoming queries were simply applicants asking where their application stood. This is a visibility problem made harder by a patchwork of seven, eight, even ten legacy systems that weren’t built to talk to each other.

The Approach: Personas Before Platforms

Rather than starting with a procurement process or a systems overhaul, the team began with service design. This was based on a set of ten principles adopted across Irish government services that put the “human in the center of decisions and design process,” said Paul. Central to this was building detailed personas: fictional but research-grounded representations of real user groups, covering digital literacy, native language, accessibility needs and cultural background.

 

The research surfaced cultural nuances that a purely technical rollout would likely have missed. European applicants, for instance, cared deeply about data residency and GDPR protections; applicants from outside the EU often didn’t prioritise the same concerns. Some user groups engaged best with visual, image-led guidance; others wanted detailed written material.

 

The distinction between simply translating content and properly localising it became a defining principle of the project. The service now supports 14 languages, but Paul was clear that translation alone wasn’t the goal.

 

“I think localizing it in the principle of service design is how you actually bring that content to life,” he said. “Does the user actually understand it? I think that’s where we probably spent a lot of our time.”

The Delivery Model: Business-Owned Change, Agile Execution

If the design philosophy set the direction, delivery discipline is what got the project across the line. Roshan, who managed the project day-to-day, described a hybrid project management methodology, all built around a strict, non-negotiable 12-month deadline tied to a multi-year, multi-phase strategic programme.

 

“There’s always going to be a gap between business and IT teams, because we work with multidisciplinary teams,” Roshan said. “Bringing them together and making them understand that we are going towards one goal – that was the key challenge.”

 

The team ran two-week Agile sprints, with the development team demonstrating progress to the business at the end of each cycle, allowing scope to be managed tightly and change requests absorbed without derailing the timeline. Roshan pointed to strict scope control, avoiding “scope creep”, as essential to hitting the deadline without compromising quality.

 

Underpinning the delivery approach was a deliberate MVP mindset. Rather than waiting years for a fully-featured system, the team prioritised early wins the department could see and measure. “The key principle was to allow the business to realize benefits as quickly as possible,” Paul said, describing a longer roadmap of two to three years within which quick wins were sequenced early.

 

Change management followed the same philosophy: build it internally, and give ownership to the department, rather than just to IT. The department developed its own lightweight change management framework, deliberately simpler than adopting an off-the-shelf model, and installed “change champions” from within the business teams themselves.

 

“It’s not just an IT consultancy or IT coming in talking about change management,  it’s owned by the business,” Paul said. “That built a level of continuity and trust.”

Where AI Fits vs. Where It Doesn’t

The service now runs on Microsoft Dynamics, which brings built-in AI capabilities such as automatically summarising lengthy customer interaction histories. This feature is designed to speed up case handling for support agents dealing with high query volumes. But Paul was pointed about the boundary the team has drawn around it.

 

“It doesn’t necessarily mean that AI makes any decisions. It doesn’t support any decision-making within the process,” he said. “The important part in all that is retaining human judgment in the department… still having that critical thinking, that critical analysis as part of the human.”

The Takeaway

Looking back, both Paul and Roshan pointed to structural lessons for future programmes. Roshan highlighted the tangible impact on citizens as the most rewarding outcome, noting strong customer uptake from the moment the service went live. Paul’s key reflection centred on ownership: in hindsight, he said, the team would bring in a dedicated business-side product owner earlier in future projects, to ensure the business has “skin in the game” from day one rather than treating transformation as something IT does to them.

 

The result is a template that runs counter to the usual assumption that digital transformation begins with technology. At the Department of Justice, it began with a room full of sticky notes, a set of personas, and a deadline nobody was allowed to move.

 

Watch or Listen to the full interview