1.1 History of Digital Transformation
The key challenges to enabling a Digital Transformation at both the industry and academic levels have been defined in many countries around the world. Some countries are further forward than others, with some saying the United Kingdom (UK) is leading with its Digital Built Britain strategy (UK Government, 2015). The strategy aims to ensure that the UK is able to harness new technologies and digital connectivity to transform the built environment and deliver real social and economic benefits to its citizens. Further initiatives such as the National Digital Twin (NDT) programme (and the NDT Hub where digital twins are hosted), the Gemini Principles, and the supporting Information Management Framework have been established to help drive the digital agenda in the UK. They are hosted and managed by the Centre for Digital Built Britain, information can be found at https://www.cdbb.cam.ac.uk/what-we-do/national-digital-twin-programme.
In Finland, a recent study (Aksenova et al., 2018) assessed the Digital Transformation journey of the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operation (AECO) sector in that country and concluded that overemphasis on technological capabilities in practice and the extensive portfolio of national R&D initiatives targeting mainly the productivity and efficiencies with technological developments did not lead to the systemic change in the established regime nor did it lead to the emergence of the new Digital Business Transformation. As a lesson learnt, the government of Finland has established a new programme in 2016, named KiraDigi (Törrönen, 2017). KiraDigi has brought about a new experimental platform to coordinate the discussions between the government departments, the city stakeholders, the AECO industry stakeholders and the complementary industries to support the emergence of the digital business ecosystem, while “The €16M programme’s vision is to develop an open, interoperable information management ecosystem for the built environment” (Törrönen, 2017).
The relationships between the professional institutions, universities, government, the industry and the other stakeholders for the competence management ecosystem are, therefore, critical if the competent workforce is to mitigate the risks of continuing with the status quo. For example, the conclusion from a number of workshops in the UK (PUN, 2019) suggested that Funders and Insurers could be critical partners to ensure that real change happens within the UK Digital Built Environment Ecosystem, particularly away from projects covered by the 2016 UK Government BIM mandate. Therefore, it is required to assess the impact and implications for the various stakeholders that are part of this digital transformation, for example:
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clients, and by extension those involved in procuring projects,
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those representing entities (either company or individual) being engaged to deliver projects (who in turn must be able to demonstrate their organisations have the collective competence, capability and capacity to discharge their contractual obligations),
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the myriad of professions who are involved in the delivering the project at any stage of the asset lifecycle; including commissioning, designing, constructing, maintaining, operating, altering and decommissioning of Built Environment assets,
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those responsible for educating and upskilling current (and future) professionals,
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those responsible with assuring the competence of practitioners,
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those responsible for the regulatory framework and standards development,
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the citizens that interact and use the built environment for all aspects of their day-to-day life, not just business
In order to be successful, it is essential to reach out beyond the boundaries of the traditional built environment professionals and including experts from other domains and industries that can complement the Digital Built Environment with new propositions (e.g. manufacturing, finance, IT) agile business practices, and competence management.