For this year’s Data by Design I want to ask you to think about what it means to be ‘digital by design’.
Creating a stellar digital innovation or organisation plan can feel easy when it’s a greenfield without existing structures and processes in place, but it’s more typical to be facilitating digitalisation as an evolution of something already in existence. How do we avoid digital from becoming a bolt-on?
Digitalisation – the act of fundamentally changing the way things get done, enabled by technology – can really add value to your organisation. It enables you to design better assets that are easier and cheaper to build with less environmental impact; allows your asset managers to increase reliability and availability, with lower operation and maintenance costs; and delivers greater schedule certainty to complex programmes. In the 2025 Data by Design, Jenny Wells, Nathan Davies and Francesca Downey describe projects where digitalisation made a real difference – data and GIS tools being used to improve performance and benefit communities.
But while digitisation offers many benefits, you still need to ‘look before you leap’. Elspeth McIntyre suggests that defence can do this through digital rehearsal, trying out solutions to work out which will succeed; and José Gilabert cautions that without effective data governance AI can be a liability rather than an opportunity. And while we’re looking to the future, Jon Yates asks if you’re ready for the transformative power of 6G.
How is your organisation going to be ‘digital by design’? As always, I’m happy to discuss this or any technology topic.
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