Mark Enzer warns that digital technology must serve people, not people serve it, and industry needs to catch up to its own leading digital companies.
Speaking at the Global Infrastructure Conference, Mark Enzer, stressed that the sector and technologists had to remember that digital transformation is “all about people and we need to keep coming back to that.”
If industry leaders do that, he suggested it would help to bring more of the industry up to the digital standards of the very best.
“If we look at the best bits of the industry it is world-leading and we can see remarkable things happening in the built environment. But the rest of the industry is not like that. So the good practice does exist and now needs to be better distributed.”
But Mr Enzer warned against expecting technology to solve problems by itself.
“Digital information allows us to use information better to put the right information into the right hands at the right time to back better decisions…. However, Technology is not the whole answer. It will never be a silver bullet. The technology should always be in the service of something else, rather than being the master.”
Those ‘masters’ are the outcomes that should always drive the industry, he explained.
“Data and digital transformation is the key enabler of our age – well into the fourth industrial revolution… It enables us to increase construction productivity and infrastructure performance, and down that road leads to better outcomes for people and nature.”
