This section collects my writing on large, long-lived systems and the organisations that depend on them. Most of these pieces are about the quiet failure modes of transformation, the kind where nothing obviously breaks, but complexity, risk, and historical decisions get frozen into new platforms and called progress. They are written for people who have to live with these systems long after the project team has gone.
A series of essays about why major HR, payroll, and workforce systems programs so often succeed technically but fail institutionally, and how complexity, history, and governance get frozen into new platforms and called progress.
Australia’s industrial system makes payroll a structural problem, not a configuration one. This essay looks at awards, enterprise agreements, long service leave, and historical arrangements, and explains why most global platforms underestimate what they are actually being asked to do.
An essay about why most HR systems are really descriptions of organisational history, and why changing platforms rarely changes the underlying model.
A serious HRIS or payroll program is not a software upgrade. This essay is about why these projects need to be treated as structural interventions, and what happens when they are not.
When data lives in global platforms, location becomes a story rather than a guarantee. This essay explores the gap between what organisations promise and what they can actually prove.