Let’s get digital
The infrastructure sector needs visionaries and a will to collaborate if it wants to lead the march towards a world fit for the next generation, says Toby Ashong.
At the start of this year, Boxwood published a paper entitled “Infrastructure for the next generation”. It highlighted three key trends in the future of infrastructure. One of these was the growing prominence of connected data, more fashionably referred to as digital. The vast majority of our survey respondents told us how excited they were about this but also how unprepared they felt the industry and individual organisations were.
It’s been a busy few months since then: the UK seized victory from the jaws of defeat by emerging from the most uncertain election in modern times with not only a functioning government but a majority party. Then the country that invented the concept of democracy found itself at a crescendo of political and financial uncertainty.
"Delivering something like ApplePay requires leadership. It also requires industry-wide agreements on standards, interfaces, commercial liabilities and so on."
No less significantly, Apple brought its phone-based contactless payment system to the UK, immediately transforming one of the most commonplace acts in our daily lives with nothing but simple short-range radio technology and a dose of connected data.
The scope for such transformation in Infrastructure is huge: buildings could intelligently self-regulate their heating and lighting (still the two biggest categories of energy consumption); buildings, networks and other systems could self-diagnose, order replacement parts and direct operatives to points of failure sometimes even predicting and pre-empting those failures to achieve new levels of reliability. Transport (and other distribution) systems could attain previously unimagined levels of utilisation through dynamic supply/demand management. The possibilities are enormous.
So, instead of spending the next several decades converting to next generation but not-so-new signalling technology, why aren’t we exploring what the step beyond is? Instead of discussing which roads to widen next, why aren’t we investing more in the development of driverless vehicles which could get more cars travelling more quickly and safely on the same roads?
Instead of prevaricating over the price of electricity and new sources of energy, why aren’t we investing more in smart homes to massively reduce our energy requirements? The potential in infrastructure is ultimately far greater than in payment systems and yet still seems so far away.
Delivering something like ApplePay requires leadership. It also requires industry-wide agreements on standards, interfaces, commercial liabilities and so on. But where there is a will there is a way and infrastructure needs more of both of these things: visionaries that dare to lead and a far greater willingness to collaborate.