Digital transformation is hitting a reality check
Organisations may have more digital tools and project data than ever before, but two Octave executive roundtables in Sydney and Brisbane suggest the harder challenge is now extracting real value from them.
“There seems to be a very strong underlying undertone of digital frustration,” Octave’s Marcus Haynes, Industry Principal APAC said at the close of the Brisbane discussion. “This is the first time I’ve heard this kind of real digital frustration coming through.”
Certainly, that frustration was what most clearly separated Brisbane from an earlier Sydney roundtable hosted by Octave.
The Sydney discussion focused heavily on the foundations of digital maturity: fragmented data, disconnected systems, poor handover, governance and the need for more trusted, integrated information across the asset lifecycle. Participants repeatedly returned to the idea that AI and advanced analytics will only deliver value if those fundamentals are fixed first.
Brisbane agreed with all of that, but the conversation went a step further.
“The question was no longer simply whether organisations had enough data, digital capability or technology. It was whether years of digital investment were actually changing how projects are delivered,” Haynes said.
In both cities, leaders from engineering, construction, infrastructure, asset management and operations described familiar pain points. Information trapped in disconnected systems, persistent silos, data lost between project stages and difficulty turning digital investment into measurable improvements in cost, schedule, safety or operational performance.
But Brisbane brought a sharper edge to the debate.
“Too much. I think those are the words of the day,” Haynes said, describing organisations collecting more information without always knowing how to contextualise it or make it useful. “We talk about data lakes. They’re not actually data lakes; they’re data swamps.”
And that distinction matters. The industry’s problem is increasingly not a lack of data. It’s too much data, in too many places, with too little context and too little ability to act on it.
And that’s where the two conversations begin to converge.
Sydney exposed the structural problem: fragmentation. Brisbane exposed the consequence: frustration. Together, they suggest the next phase of digital maturity will be less about adding technology and more about redesigning the way information, people, processes and commercial models work together across the asset lifecycle.
More data, less clarity
So, if Sydney exposed the fragmentation problem, Brisbane showed what happens when years of digitalisation add another layer of complexity.
In Sydney, participants described data duplicated across systems. Inconsistent information and project environments where multiple platforms operate side by side without providing a clear end-to-end view. The desire for a “single source of truth” or at least a trusted, shared environment, came up repeatedly.
Octave’s Cody Faulkner, Senior Industry Consultant APAC cautioned that simply connecting those systems isn’t enough.
“If I integrate systems just for the sake of integration, and not actually standardising those processes and understanding why these are talking to each other, it doesn’t really achieve anything,” Faulkner said.
Brisbane was wrestling with much the same problem, but from another angle: there was simply too much.
The problem, Haynes argued, is “not just the volume of information being collected, but knowing where it sits, what it relates to and how to get it into the hands of the people who need it.”
In some organisations, multiple document management systems compound the problem, leaving users searching across different repositories for the information they need.
One Brisbane participant put the problem in stark commercial terms, describing projects that can identify exactly how much money they are losing, “down to the dollar”, yet still struggle to influence the outcome.
Indeed, it was a telling distinction. Visibility isn’t the same as intelligence. And knowing something is going wrong has limited value if the information arrives too late or without the context needed in order to change it.
That was a point Octave’s Reynold Lin, Senior Industry Consultant APAC also raised in Sydney, where he argued for more real-time, adaptable project intelligence rather than relying on historical reporting.
“You don’t want to make a decision based on data from the rear vision mirror,” Lin said.
Across both cities, the conversation moved away from simply collecting more data towards making existing information more useful, contextual and actionable.
Digitalised, but not transformed
This raised an uncomfortable question in Brisbane. Has the industry transformed its processes, or simply digitalised them?
One participant said that while the tools used in engineering have changed significantly over the past two decades, some of the underlying workflows have not. Redlines and as-builts may now be digital, but information can still be produced, filed away and rarely used again.
“If I have a paper system and I put it onto an iPad, I still have the same process,” Haynes said. “I’ve digitised it and perhaps made an incremental improvement, but I haven’t actually changed the way we work.”
For Haynes, the order matters: “It’s people, process and technology, and in that order.”
The same tension came up in the Sydney discussion, where participants spoke about the human and organisational barriers to transformation alongside the technical ones. Haynes also warned in Sydney that the industry hadn’t spent enough time talking about the change management required alongside data and technology.
Brisbane put that challenge into practical terms. One contractor described an organisation introducing new enterprise systems while still working with frontline crews accustomed to paper-based processes. More granular digital reporting could deliver better information, but it could also create more work for the people expected to capture it.
The lesson from both cities? “Technology adoption is not the same as digital maturity,” Haynes said.
What’s more, attendees agreed that transformation only happens when the process changes with it, and when the people doing the work can see the value.
Commercial model is part of the problem
Brisbane also pushed the discussion beyond technology and into a harder question: are the way projects are bought and sold actually working against digital transformation?
Several participants argued that procurement and contracting models can reinforce the very silos organisations are trying to dismantle.
A contractor noted that the way a client packages a project (from the contract form to the procurement and delivery model) directly influences behaviour and the information different parties are prepared to share.
Another participant described digital maturity as a “team game”: an organisation can be highly sophisticated internally, but if the client and broader supply chain aren’t able or willing to work in the same way, that maturity can be difficult to translate into the project.
There was also a tension between upfront project cost and longer-term asset value. Participants questioned how organisations justify spending more during delivery for digital capability that may produce its greatest return years later in operations.
Octave’s Yasser Robi, Senior Account Manager said project-by-project thinking can intensify the problem.
“The more projects you put into a system, the more analytics it can provide,” Robi said, pointing to the opportunity to use real project information to improve future estimating and decision-making.
But that value is difficult to build when technology is treated as a cost against an individual project rather than an enterprise capability that accumulates value over time.
Haynes returned to the issue, calling for more integrated commercial models that share risk and focus on what’s best for the asset across its lifecycle.
It points to a bigger challenge. If organisations want lifecycle outcomes, they may also need commercial models designed around lifecycle value.
Handover remains the weak link
For all the differences between the two cities, one problem persisted almost unchanged from Sydney to Brisbane: handover.
Sydney participants described information being lost between engineering, construction and operations, along with the continuing difficulty of transferring project data into the systems asset owners ultimately need to run and maintain their facilities.
Certainly, fragmentation across lifecycle stages emerged as one of the strongest themes in the room.
Faulkner argued that part of the problem starts with how the industry thinks about the lifecycle itself.
“Even our mindset walking into the room is that these are different, but they’re completely intertwined, and they always should be,” he said.
Brisbane told much the same story.
In fact, one construction leader described information gaps emerging as data passes between multiple stakeholders, with a continuing disconnect between construction and the client's operational environment. Even where the information exists, the transfer into operations can remain “clunky”.
Others questioned what happens to older assets where critical information was never digitalised in the first place. One participant compared the problem to converting old 35mm photographs into digital files: organisations may be building increasingly sophisticated digital environments while still relying on historical asset information that exists only on paper or in analogue formats.
For Haynes, those transition points are precisely where value can disappear.
Octave's focus, he said, is on addressing “the gaps where data is lost” as assets move from design to construction, operations and protection.
What’s more, the implication is that handover needs to stop being treated as an end-of-project exercise, Faulker said.
“It should always work backwards from what do we want to operate. It shouldn’t move forward from engineering,” Faulkner said.
In other words, if information will ultimately be needed to operate the asset, that requirement should shape what’s captured from the beginning.
AI raises a bigger question about human judgement
Notably, AI was firmly on the agenda in both cities, but neither room treated it as the answer to the industry's digital challenges.
“AI is not a silver bullet,” Haynes said in Sydney. “The assumption that AI is always correct is wrong. Full stop,” he said.
Participants were already experimenting with AI across areas such as predictive maintenance, reporting, scheduling and document-intensive work. But the Sydney conversation repeatedly returned to the same guardrails: data quality, governance, verification and human accountability.
Brisbane reinforced those concerns while adding another dimension: what happens to expertise as more work is automated?
Participants questioned how the next generation of engineers will develop judgement if AI increasingly performs some of the foundational work through which previous generations built experience.
There was also discussion about preserving the judgement and expertise accumulated by experienced workers as they leave the industry.
The opportunity, then, may not be to replace that expertise, but to capture more of it.
Attendees agreed that better-defined processes, structured data and AI-supported systems could help organisations make institutional knowledge more accessible to the next generation. But human oversight remains critical, particularly when experience is what allows someone to recognise that an answer may be technically plausible but still wrong.
Across both cities, the emerging AI story was therefore less about replacement than augmentation.
The challenge is not simply teaching AI what the organisation knows. On the flip side, it’s ensuring people continue to develop the expertise required to challenge what AI tells them.
Industry keeps relearning the same lessons
Brisbane also exposed another form of information loss: what happens between projects.
One participant described lessons learned as a persistent industry weakness. Projects finish, teams disperse and people move quickly onto the next job. Lessons may be documented, but the people who need to hear them aren’t always in the room, and the knowledge doesn’t necessarily find its way into the next project.
The result is familiar: organisations can find themselves solving problems they’ve solved before.
Sydney had raised a similar frustration, with participants questioning why successful approaches and digital capabilities are so often recreated project by project rather than standardised and reused.
Octave’s Robi said there was far greater value available from the information organisations already collect.
“Quite often, information is collected only to meet the minimum requirements of the client,” Robi said. “Organisations don’t realise how much more value they could extract from it.”
Certainly, that creates an interesting opportunity for the next phase of lifecycle intelligence.
Instead of lessons learned sitting in a document or disappearing with the project team, connected information and AI could potentially help reveal previous experience when and where it becomes relevant to the next project, Haynes said.
“The industry's accumulated knowledge may be one of its most valuable data assets. The challenge is making sure it doesn't have to be rediscovered every time,” he said.
From digital transformation to lifecycle intelligence
Across two cities, there was no suggestion that industrial organisations should stop investing in technology.
But there was a strong sense that more technology alone is no longer the answer.
“It’s not that there isn’t new technology. It’s that we could be making far better use of what’s already available,” Faulkner told the Sydney roundtable.
Notably, Brisbane arrived at much the same conclusion from a different direction.
“We’re trying to look at the workflow rather than the specific tool,” Robi said.
Sydney highlighted the foundations that remain unresolved: trusted data, integration, governance, standardisation and a clearer source of truth.
Brisbane showed what happens when those problems persist despite years of digital investment: data overload, duplicated systems, frustrated users and processes that may be digital without being fundamentally different.
That may be the change that matters most. Instead of beginning with a platform, organisations can begin with the decision they’re trying to improve.
What information is needed? Who needs it? When do they need it? Where is it being lost? What process is preventing it from flowing? And what commercial or organisational barrier is standing in the way?
Only then does technology enter the equation.
Brisbane's “digital frustration” therefore doesn't necessarily suggest digital transformation has failed. It may suggest expectations have changed.
Organisations have spent years digitalising, implementing platforms and accumulating information. Increasingly, they expect those investments to translate into something tangible: less rework, lower risk, more predictable cost and schedule, stronger safety, smoother handovers and better decisions.
And across Sydney and Brisbane, one message emerged particularly clearly.
“The industry doesn't have a shortage of data. It has a shortage of connected, contextualised and actionable intelligence,” Haynes said.
“Closing that gap may be the real next phase of digital transformation.”
SIDEBARS:
What leaders can do now
Across both roundtables, several practical priorities emerged for organisations looking to turn digital investment into better project and asset outcomes.
Start with the decision, not the technology. Define the business or project decision you want to improve, then work backwards to the information, workflow and technology required to support it.
Get the data foundations right. Focus on trusted, structured and contextualised information rather than simply collecting more data. AI will only amplify weaknesses if the underlying data can’t be trusted.
Design for the lifecycle from the beginning. Determine what operations will ultimately need and capture that information during engineering and construction, rather than trying to reconstruct it at handover.
Fix the process before digitalising it. Putting an existing workflow onto a digital platform may improve efficiency, but it won't necessarily transform how work gets done.
Treat digital maturity as a team sport. Bring clients, contractors, designers, operators and the wider supply chain along. One digitally mature organisation can’t create a connected lifecycle on its own.
Turn project learning into enterprise knowledge. Create repeatable ways to capture and reuse lessons, data and successful approaches so each new project isn't forced to start again.
Use AI to augment judgement, not replace it. Apply AI where it can remove repetitive work, highlight knowledge and improve insight, while retaining human verification, governance and accountability.
Measure digital investment by outcomes. Look beyond implementation and adoption to whether technology is reducing rework and risk, improving safety, increasing predictability or enabling better decisions.
Voices from Sydney and Brisbane:
Selected comments from industry leaders participating in the two Octave executive roundtables.
On fragmentation
“The challenge is almost always fragmentation between teams.”
On disconnected data
“You end up with layers of data where some are old, some are out of date, and they’re not really linking up.”
On too many platforms
“It’s one platform for this, another platform for that, and when you add it all up, it becomes a very big cost.”
On AI and human judgement
“You can automate the process, but you can’t automate the judgment.”
On lifecycle thinking
“It should always work backwards from what do we want to operate. It should not move forward from engineering.”
On the single source of truth
“I think we need a master source where everybody can draw the information they need and contribute back into it.”
On turning data into action
“I’ve seen projects that can tell you exactly how much money they’re losing, down to the dollar, but they can’t seem to influence the outcome.”
On digitisation versus transformation
“While the information has been digitised, I don’t think the actual workflow has changed that much.”
On digital maturity
“We can be as mature as we like, but unless the whole supply chain comes with us, it doesn’t matter.”
On data overload
“There’s so much data available that it’s almost too much. What are they doing with it? Is it the right data?”
On lessons learned
“The one thing I’d like to get across the industry is: turn up to lessons learned and participate in it.”
On innovation
“Sometimes you need a deadline you simply can’t miss to enable brave decisions.”
On accountability
“AI might assist, but accountability still sits with people.”