A Field Guide to APS AI Adoption

What the data already tells us about how the Australian Public Service is adopting AI, what it isn't telling us, and why the gap between the two matters. Why this guide exists The usual question about AI in the Australian Public Service is prescriptive: what should the APS

Simple Made Inevitable: The Economics of Language Choice in the LLM Era

Two years ago, I wrote about managing twenty microservices at Qantas with a small team. The problem was keeping services in sync, coordinating changes across system boundaries, fighting the entropy of a codebase that grew faster than our ability to reason about it. Many years before my time, someone had

Polishing the handcuffs then swallowing the keys

I’ve read a lot of government reports in my time. Most of them are dry, dusty things that serve as excellent door stops or cures for insomnia. But every now and then, you come across one that tries so hard to polish a specific narrative that the cracks in

Machines of Managerial Discretion

I’ve just finished reading Dario Amodei’s latest essay, "The Adolescence of Technology." I must admit, reading it gave me a distinct sense of déjà vu - specifically, the feeling I get when I’m sitting in a strategy workshop with a room full of highly paid executives

The Strategy-Shaped Object

I've just had a look at the Australian Government’s "National AI Plan 2025" and I'm not surprised. It certainly looks like a strategy. It has vision statements, goals, and nine distinct actions. But look closer, and the familiar emptiness yawns back at you.

The All-Singing, All-Dancing Central Team

There’s a persistent belief in the public sector that if the existing machinery is slow, risk-averse, and fragmented, the solution is to build a new, smaller machine next to it. A "Centre of Excellence," a "Transformation Office," an "Innovation Hub." It’s

The Harness and the Haze: Six Reflections on Stochastic Architecture

It feels like we are at an inflection point; the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are extraordinary, offering new ways to synthesize information, automate complex cognitive tasks, and extract insights from vast unstructured datasets. But integrating these stochastic components - these probabilistic black boxes - into systems that demand reliability, traceability,

The Automated Managerialist's Dream

I remember sitting in a Gartner Conference workshop around 2013, somewhere in the Sydney. We were talking about "Big Data" and the Australian Public Service. The consultancy partner leading the session, all suit and enthusiasm, declared that data was the "new oil" and that if organisations

Deja Vu: Why the APS struggles with data maturity

I’ve just read the latest Australian Public Service Data Maturity Report... and honestly, it feels like déjà vu. The headline? A system-wide score of 2 out of 5 which Finance optimistically labels as “Developing”. Key areas like Data Architecture, Analytics, and crucially Data Quality & Metadata are stuck

Leveraging Polylith to improve consistency, reduce complexity and increase changeability

[This post originally appeared on the Qantas Engineering Blog] Whilst you might not know “what” Polylith is, I’ll bet that the factors that influenced its adoption as our source architecture — the “why” — will be very familiar. This story explores the driving forces of code changeability, consistency and complexity and

The economics of information management

Information as a strategic asset If your business relies on information (and it would be rare to find a business that doesn't) then it's important to manage that information effectively to maximise its value. Unfortunately, many organisations don't consider information to be a key