The Foreign Service Journal, December 2005

couple of years ago, I bought a new personal computer. Selecting exactly the features I wanted proved fascinating, and purchasing the equipment was easy. It was when the boxes arrived on my doorstep that the fun stopped. The new machine held a magnitude of capabilities, but none of my own data. All my e-mail addresses and contact information, settings for my Internet provider, and the thousands of records I had built up were on my obsolete machine. It took more than two months of painstaking work before I could D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 21 F O C U S O N I T A N D D I P L O M A C Y W IRING S TATE : A P ROGRESS R EPORT Valerie Sinclair A O NCE A TECHNOLOGY LAGGARD , THE S TATE D EPARTMENT HAS BECOME AN INNOVATOR . B UT THE PACE MUST BE SUSTAINED TO TRULY TRANSFORM DIPLOMACY . B Y J OE J OHNSON