Then and Now: A front-row seat to 36 years of digital transformation

Date

02 November 2026

This year Finance recognises its 50-year anniversary. To celebrate our people and the achievements that make us who we are today, we will be sharing some stories in our Then and Now series. Join us as we take a trip down memory lane to see how Finance has evolved over the last 50 years.

Meet Fiona, from our ICT Division:

“I joined the Department of Finance in 1989 when we were located in the Treasury building facing the Hyatt Hotel.

We were using the mainframe Budget Management System and 5 ¼ floppy disks (back when the disks were indeed floppy!) for providing reports and updating portfolio monies.

Being a new kid on the block, one of my first jobs was to organise a messy filing compactus containing more than 400 old paper files. I was proud of this achievement as it took a while to catalogue, but everyone mentioned it was the best filing system they had seen!

In 1991 I got a promotion to IT Branch where I fell in love with IT. A highlight was the monthly departmental newsletter I composed called Interface – it was printed on green paper and featured brain puzzles, with the answer revealed in the next month’s edition.

In the mid-90s my area converted the department to Windows95 and saw the introduction of the internet – our team had one PC that only a few people would use, featuring search engines Dogpile and Yahoo.

Over the next 20 years I worked in many Finance business areas and office locations – I even helped cable all the desks and install IT equipment ready for staff to move from the John Gorton Building into our current building at One Canberra Avenue.

Over the last 36 years, I have been through many IT technologies with Finance, from mainframe, dumb terminals, token-ring, LAN, WAN, On Premise and now Cloud. It’s been an amazing career, and I wouldn’t have wanted to work anywhere but Finance!”

Fiona and colleagues learning MVS (a mainframe operating system) through an ‘inter-active video-computer training module’, 1990 (Department of Finance Annual Report 1989-90)