By aligning asset owners, designers, contractors and suppliers around shared enterprise outcomes – as opposed to individual contracts – infrastructure enterprise delivery has the potential to improve performance, reduce waste and accelerate innovation.
Digital Transformation is one of the key pillars of the Project 13 model for enterprise delivery, developed by the Infrastructure Client Group. Progressing the adoption of common digital tools, however, can be among the biggest challenges to the creation of a high performing enterprise, because it is likely that all enterprise partners use different digital tools and platforms.
Drawing from experience of multiple enterprise delivery entities, here are some factors to take into account when developing an enterprise’s technology environment. They are not a roadmap for digital transformation, but highlight some areas in which early attention can help support an enterprise’s effective long-term technology development.
Technology is a business capability
Technology should be treated like any other business asset or organisational investment. Its purpose is to enable value, but clarity is required about what that value is. So, technology decisions should begin with a clear understanding of the intended outcome, success criteria, constraints and return on investment. Without that clarity, an enterprise may not make the most effective technology asset or implementation choices.
AI is a good example. Although this is a powerful tool, it should not be used for its own sake but only if there is a genuine need. Strong AI use cases exist in an enterprise environment, for example around disparate partner data and the analysis of it. This is an area of huge potential opportunity.
Strategy and operating model prefigure technology
A sound technology strategy depends on clarity about the enterprise itself: why it exists, what value it creates, how it will deliver that value and which capabilities it needs. This is fundamentally operating-model design. If the enterprise lacks a clear purpose, plan and value proposition, it cannot determine fully what technology it needs nor identify the most essential investments. The approach to data and technology should be designed around the enterprise’s value proposition.
Enterprise technology and data are foundational enablers of the operating model, supporting information flow, governance, integration and organisational capability so that owners and delivery partners can make better, faster and more consistent decisions. Early agreement on how key enterprise information will be owned, governed, assured and shared ensures data quality and accountability are designed in from the outset, rather than addressed later as technical issues.
Understand the importance of technologists
Technologists are an essential component in successful digital transformation, drawing on their expertise and knowledge of systems, architecture and strategic moves within the technology landscape. They must however be supported by other experts to bring the vision to life in a complex delivery organisation. Effective technology leadership combines technical understanding with expertise in selection, implementation, operation, change and governance. Successful enterprise technology leadership also requires budgeting, portfolio management, stakeholder engagement and a broad understanding of cross-functional business processes.
Treat IT and digital as one
In construction, some organisations split IT and digital functions creating an artificial divide. IT is often treated as data and communications equipment and infrastructure, service support and maintenance, while digital is seen as the use of digital tools directly on project work and business functions. In practice, both depend on the same technology stack and need the same joined-up capabilities including user understanding, business partnership, outcome definition, road mapping and implementation and operational management. Digital functions are often born out of a frustration with the IT team, because if IT is designed to purchase, run and maintain equipment they may not be party to conversations about the outcomes desired from technology; and that is often where digital functions are born. A good option is to expand the IT department’s role to fully support the enterprise’s goals rather than building a separate parallel digital team.
Consider a start-up mentality
A newly formed enterprise does not inherit all the policies, processes, systems and support structures that people take for granted in an established organisation, this includes the technology function. Creating an enterprise technology function is not the same as digital transformation in an existing entity, so an approach more akin to a start-up mentality is preferential. If a fledgling enterprise does not adopt this sort of mindset there is a risk of assuming that IT/digital functions are in place when they are not. It must therefore be designed deliberately and sequenced differently from a conventional corporate technology transformation. The start-up analogy is not exact, because the enterprise is formed by large partner organisations with established practices and systems, something atypical to a start-up, but the analogy is useful in exposing missing foundations and assumptions about what is already in place – and understanding this early is key to success.
Define the enterprise boundary
Early operating-model work, including developing the technology environment, should distinguish what belongs at enterprise level from what should remain with individual partners. Pulling too many technology systems, processes or standards into the centre can require the need to mediate conversations between multiple independent parties with no real mechanism for brokering those conversations. For example, trying to set data standards for the whole enterprise for every piece of data requires consensus from every partner. Centralisation may improve the core activity while creating greater inefficiency at other interfaces with partner organisations, so it requires a clear business case. The guiding principles are how do we get value? What technology capabilities do we actually need to have in place to deliver that value?
The question might not be if the enterprise should standardise on one system, but if it has enough interoperability to work effectively. Shared interfaces, agreed data standards for information, common security expectations and clear ownership may provide more value than forcing every partner onto the same tools.
Account for structural barriers to collaboration
The need to work across organisational boundaries is a contributory factor in the cost of delivering infrastructure projects and programmes. Infrastructure enterprise delivery aims to reduce costs by making work across organisational boundaries more collaborative and less transactional. The enterprise’s ability to collaborate is affected by structural disincentives such as partners being accountable to different owners and, as separate legal entities, being bound by regulation. From a technology perspective information has to flow across such boundaries in the form of collaboration or data exchange. So there is a need to ensure a focus on the points of integration that best serve the enterprise’s goals. Identifying the most effective points of integration enables the development of a technology strategy to serve the enterprise in a way that takes the structural disincentives into account.
Support whole life asset value
Enterprise technology should support more than delivery efficiency. Information created during design and construction can have long term value for operation, maintenance, renewal and asset management. Decisions about platforms, data standards and information quality should consider the full lifecycle of the asset, not only the immediate needs of the delivery phase.
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