How to Transform Intelligently

What does cross-collaboration look like in today's working climate and where can the positive force of culture find its place in transformations?

As the working world reflects on a year to remember, these senior technology leaders consider how the well-trod conversation on transformation may have to finally evolve, intelligently. In partnership with Dynatrace. 

With Peter Stojanovic moderating, the speakers of this roundtable debate include:

• Dave Anderson, Digital Evangelist, Dynatrace
• Christelle Heikkila, IT Director, Arsenal F.C.
• Richard Newsome, CTO, Sainsbury’s
• Declan Hunt, Executive Director of Tech and Digital, Macmillan Cancer Support
• Tony Sweeney, CIO Asset Finance, Close Brothers

Dynatrace provides software intelligence to simplify cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation. With automatic and intelligent observability at scale, their all-in-one platform provides answers about the performance and security of applications, the underlying infrastructure, and experience of all users.

What's in infrastructure?

Infrastructure provides the foundation for our global society to operate and thrive. Yet our research suggests that nearly 40 percent of the $9 trillion invested in infrastructure annually is poorly spent because of bottlenecks, lack of innovation, and market failures. In late 2015, our third Global Infrastructure Initiative (GII) summit explored how innovation and technology can both improve the delivery of critical infrastructure and get more out of existing infrastructure. After three days of discussion, we concluded that, while there’s been some progress, the speed and scale of efforts to address infrastructure issues have varied. We then identified more than a dozen themes that can be applied when planning, financing, building, and operating infrastructure.

Ready the plan

It’s essential to develop a sound infrastructure-investment plan—one that serves current and future user needs, drives improved economic growth, and minimises socioeconomic disparities. But doing so requires translating bold ideas into feasible projects that are politically durable and adaptable when dynamics change. Several elements are critical: working with decision makers at a local level to bring projects to life; engaging stakeholders and potential partners from the outset, co-creating a vision of what is possible and the potential benefits; working with governments to engender public support and manage expectations for megaprojects; and encouraging experimentation and parallel processing in design, engineering, environmental reviews, and procurement to reduce time and allow for much-needed innovation.

What next?

Despite annual global spending of about $9 trillion on infrastructure assets across all classes, an additional $15 trillion to $20 trillion will be required over the next 15 years. To achieve projected global economic growth, GII participants believe it’s crucial to develop innovative financing approaches. Among the priorities with regard to financing: collaborating with governments, development-finance institutions, and the private sector to develop a pipeline of projects that meet investor expectations; establishing public-sector infrastructure-delivery organisations to help reduce political risks; looking beyond traditional funding sources to get better risk-adjusted returns; and, when political support for privatisation is lacking, pursuing long-term leases and operating agreements instead.