I regularly talked about the organisation paralysis that had besot our organisation and what could be done to break the cycle. It became clear that sacking everyone was not the answer.

What we found was most of the underperforming people were reasonably intelligent but had for whatever reason, been held in duties that never required them to change for many years including decades for some - which is a work environment found more in the public sector than the private sector. What we also found was many of them were willing to learn new things, but in the public service framework that means finding money for retraining which is difficult to justify when the organisation is already paralysed.

So instead what we really strived for was to get our people to show a bit of self initiative and flexibility to readily adopt the new technologies we were proposing that would free us from the current entanglement which was getting more complicated and more costly every year. We found with a bit (ok, a lot) of guidance, these people quickly got confident with the new ways of working better, and they liked it.

Unfortunately we still had the usual problem players, people who would shoot down change and curb a lot of the enthusiasm for it, most of it misguided. It was explained to these problem players that the current situation is unsustainable but they were too far set in their ways to believe it. Also, in my relatively short time there I've had two selfish HR incidents brought against me that have fortunately not progressed any further.

The organisation is slowly changing, probably at a rate of ten times slower and ten times more costly than private industry, but after all the noise and energy we finally believe we are accelerating down the new path that was set.

Technology was the enabler for change - but not for sake of it unlike a few other federal organisations that have made a huge number of computer contractors very rich for little gain. Hopefully we won't have an IBM/Census moment whilst on our journey, so long as our due diligence remains thorough we feel we can continue to navigate through the current minefield and reinvent ourselves so that our organisation remains useful and relevant to those it serves.