Digital Leadership & Cultural Change

Industry members of the leadership and cultural change pillar will be passionate about digital transformation across the built environment sector. They will play a key role in driving the culture change required to realise digital transformation in support of innovative, effective, and sustainable evolution in mindset and practice within the sector. Working collaboratively with a team of industry experts and innovators, members will be the “voice of customer” for stakeholders, including (but not limited to) public and private clients, consultants, contractors, SMEs, and professional bodies. A central enabler for culture change will be the creation of a single source of expertise where productivity, energy performance, sustainability, decarbonisation, the circular economy, procurement, standards adoption, and BIM co-exist and are actively promoted, supported, and enabled, including through provision of appropriate training and education.

Digital Standards

Industry members of the digital standards pillar will be champions of the benefits of common rules, guidelines, and workflows that facilitate improvement of information flow and information management across full asset lifecycles. Digital standards provide a common language that can be translated to technical specifications enabling clients, designers, contractors, and facilities managers, irrespective of their preferred tools, to communicate efficiently and reduce cost, rework, and disputes. The Build Digital Project digital standards pillar will be populated by leaders in standards adoption who will work with the innovation team to deliver guidance, showcase best practice, and assist organisations, irrespective of scale or role within the construction supply chain, to excel. This pillar, working closely with the Digital Procurement and Education and Training pillars, will develop and deliver to the sector an Irish Information Management (Digital Construction) Framework.

Digital Education & Training

Education and training are key to the digital transformation of the Irish construction sector. Clients, managers, professionals, and all workers need to have relevant knowledge and abilities to collectively advance the design, construction, and life-cycle management of the built environment. Industry members in this pillar will represent the key stakeholder groups of both consumers and producers of training and education provision. The outputs of the pillar will include a comprehensive suite of upskilling courses, aligned with the other pillars of activity of the Build Digital Project, available for high-quality, consistent delivery across the country, including with the support of a wide range of professional bodies, representative groups, and public and private educational organisations. Education programmes at 3rd level will also be further developed to attract new talent to a more innovative sector with exciting career options.

Digital Procurement

The industry members of the digital procurement pillar will bring national and international expertise on best practice in sustainable digital procurement and digital product supply chain practices to the forefront of the Build Digital Project. The innovators within this pillar will closely monitor the project’s Living Labs. Industry member inputs into development of adaptations of best practice into guidelines and exemplars, via in-depth case studies and lessons learned analyses, will be essential. The goal of this pillar is to develop supports that will make it easier for SMEs across the entire construction supply chain to learn how to adapt to more agile, digitally enabled, sustainable procurement practices. Additional supports for guiding this transformation will be provided to SME leadership teams by the leadership and cultural change with other enablers being provided as guides, toolkits, and training materials by the other pillars.

Sustainability & Circular Economy

The excessive patterns of consumption typical within many current construction practices have been facilitated by the traditional linear extract-produce consume-dispose resource flow model of the modern economic system. There is now a unique opportunity to move towards a more circular economy and built environment sector – one that prioritises designing out waste and that views products, components, and assets as valuable resources, which should retain utility for as long as possible. Industry members in this pillar will be passionate about, and leaders in, transforming mindsets and actions to achieve a more sustainable, responsible sector. This pillar will develop, pilot, and continuously improve a number of toolkits for use by SMEs and clients, both for adaptation of their businesses directly and in support of their supply chains. A toolkit for use by educators and trainers, including in-house trainers, will also be developed. Industry members will play a critical role in ensuring the fitness-for-purpose of all developed tools.