How to drive leadership and innovation in civil infrastructure
How can client organisations provide leadership to transform good practice in the construction industry?
The Government has highlighted the need for a long-term infrastructure investment plan, to ensure that Britain can compete in the global race for growth. Together with capital investment for new infrastructure to meet increasing demand, there remains the challenge of maintaining and modernising the existing, ageing and sometimes failing, infrastructure on which we depend.
As part of the new civil infrastructure theme, on 11 December 2013 CIRIA brought together senior representatives from national civil infrastructure client organisations including Crossrail, Environment Agency, Gatwick Airport, Highways Agency, London Underground, Northumbrian Water, and Thames Water to facilitate cross-sector dialogue and identify common challenges and potential collaborative solutions.
Using the themes of the Industrial Strategy for Construction and the ‘Construction 2025’ targets as a basis, the group identified a number of opportunities for new collaborative activities in 2014.
The age of ‘digital design engineering’ and modern methods of construction can bring significant opportunities to modernise the industry and deliver infrastructure faster, at lower cost, and with lower emissions.
With the new civil infrastructure group initiatives, CIRIA aims to:
- provide a platform for engagement in industry leadership activities
- broker new innovative collaborations
- identify gaps in knowledge and possible collaborative solutions
The first of these activities, a second meeting of the client group followed by an evening event Smart construction and intelligent infrastructure on 13 March 2014, will focus on ‘big data’ and how technologies such as BIM can be applied to both the construction phase and the management of infrastructure assets, networks and systems.
Join the discussion at our event on 13 March, or stay up to date on the CIRIA network blog and our Twitter account, our platform for knowledge sharing, collaboration and discussion across the construction industry.