Blog from Alexandra Bolton on this months CDBB activities

Alexandra Bolton, Deputy Director of the Centre for Digital Built Britain, gives an update of the latest CDBB activity and looks forward to upcoming events and announcements.

Last week the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) supported Digital Construction Week (DCW) and members of the team attended the two-day event, contributing to panel sessions, presentations and the keynote address. Held at London Excel, DCW attracted delegates from home and abroad and combined an exhibition showcasing the latest innovation and technology in the built environment, with seminars, workshops, thought leadership presentations and classes creating a dynamic platform to explore the future of digital construction. 

The Centre was invited to share the programme’s vision of a digital built Britain with delegates at DCW. Our programme to date has shown that the shift beyond BIM Level 2 is not linear in nature and can be broadly defined as the change from the improved asset delivery and maintenance to the smart operation and performance of a portfolio of assets, which can be integrated to enable the optimisation of organisational business services and socio-economic outcomes. However, integration involving the interoperable system of asset portfolios, service delivery processes, social systems and user information cannot be delivered with BIM alone. It requires the integration and interfacing of BIM data to service-delivery processes, within secure information management framework and across federated digital twins.

Government tasked the Centre with forming a Digital Framework Task Group (DFTG) to guide the development and adoption of a digital framework for infrastructure data and Mark Enzer, Chair of the DFTG, gave the keynote speech at DCW titled ‘Creating a digital built Britain’. The speech considered the digitisation of the entire life cycle of our built assets and innovative ways of delivering more capacity from our existing social and economic infrastructure to deliver better services to citizens.  

This theme continued to shape conversation and discussion when Mark joined a number of the CDBB team, including Jennifer Schooling, Chair of the CDBB Research Strategy Steering Group, Amelia Burnett, Head of Engagement, and David Philp, Level 2 Communications Manager, in a panel session chaired by Rosemary Nunn, the founder and Managing Director of the Innovation and Knowledge Agency. We were delighted to engage with so many interested and interesting delegates who were keen to explore the challenges and opportunities that come with the digitisation of the built environment and the potential impact on the wider economy.

Our research funding calls, made in the summer, are currently being finalised, with Early Career Researchers and General Research Calls now funded. We will soon announce full details of the funded calls and look forward to sharing these with you. Looking ahead, our series of high-level roundtable discussions, organised in association with the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) and designed to accelerate adoption of the government’s digital strategy for the built environment, continues with the next event planned for 28 November.  

Next week we are hosting the Security-Mindedness for Smart Infrastructure: Challenges and Opportunities event and workshop on 1 November at Downing College, Cambridge. A number of experts, including CDBB’s Security Project Manager, Alexandra Luck, and a UK government security advisor, will give thought-provoking presentations highlighting a number of issues concerning security mindedness of smart infrastructure. The day will include case study presentations and a workshop session for delegates to explore the challenges and needs of their own organisations from a number of perspectives, including taking a holistic approach to security – physical, personnel, cyber.  I look forward to meeting many of you at this not-to-be-missed event.