With the country facing the onslaught of lockdowns for the first time as COVID infections began to rise, the newly appointed chief statistician, and long-time public servant, Dr David Gruen decided things had to be done differently.

He'd started the role in January that year after returning from a family holiday and within two months, he and the agency realised the deadly virus was going to be a "big deal".

The fast-changing environment meant the statistics agency needed to also change gears.

"We were in a position to provide information in a way that would be particularly useful," he said.

"People were just relying on anecdotes and didn't have any proper data and we were in a position to make those analyses."

While the ABS tends to prefer large surveys with high response rates, the process takes time, Dr Gruen said.

Instead, the agency decided to try a new tack by conducting short surveys and smaller sample sizes in order to publish results quicker.

ABS interviewers began phoning about a thousand businesses on March 16, 2020 and had published the results 10 days later.

"The ABS has never had 10 days between starting to collect data and publishing the results," Dr Gruen said.

"There's a trade off between speed and accuracy but, in these sort of circumstances, any information we can provide faster was going to be incredibly valuable because for government and the community, things were changing so fast."

It was the first test of many for the former economist.

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Last year's nationwide census was delivered without any major breaches or crashes. Dr Gruen said he and his team were determined to not let the disastrous "censusfail" five years earlier be repeated.

"There was an enormous determination to make sure that it didn't happen again," he said.

While he insists much of the work had been done before he arrived, Dr Gruen said the agency's mechanisms were put through robust tests to avoid any catastrophic failures on census night.

With the help of Australian Cyber Security Agency, the system stood up against 26 dummy distributed denial of service attacks - the type of cyber attack that took the census offline for nearly 40 hours in 2016.

"Everyone who was involved in [the 2021 census], including me, was intimately aware of what happened in 2016." he said.

"We had very close cooperation with the Australian Cyber Security Centre in which they used their expertise to give us a lot of advice and check our software and hardware so that we were as confident as we could be that everything would go without a hitch."

Dr Gruen joins a group of nearly 30 to be appointed as an officer of the Order of Australia on Wednesday for his economic and public administration contributions.

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On reflection, his time in the service across at least two decades, or three, if you count his time at the Reserve Bank of Australia, has landed him in a number of interesting and almost unexpected roles.

He said it's something young public servants should know early on in their careers.

"As society changes, the public service has to respond to new challenges," he said.

"I think people are surprised when they come into the service at just how varied careers can be and just how interesting the work can be."

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