Speaking at CeBIT Australia's Big Data Conference 2012 in Sydney this week, Alexander said that like the events in Homer's poem, the Treasury's big data roadmap took a decade to achieve. Its internal big data project is also called Odysseus after the Greek hero of .

Part of the reason the Treasury's big data odyssey took a decade, just as it took 10 years for Odysseus to return home after the Trojan War, was, according to Alexander, subject to forces beyond his control.

"Without being too unkind to my own organisation, in some ways they were stuck in the mid-1990s where Microsoft Excel [spread sheets] had been used," he said.

"We have people taking massive data sets from the Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], Reserve Bank and other sources which are cut into a set of rows. This meant that we ran out of rows and columns in Excel."

To solve this problem, Treasury IT staff took a number of Microsoft products and integrated these into Excel to build what is called Odysseus.