The property and construction sectors have been among the hardest hit throughout the pandemic, with lockdowns challenging operations at work sites and across the industry, while throwing the broader business of property management into total disarray.

All of this occurred against a backdrop of slower rates of digital transformation when compared with other industries. Well, that’s certainly the perception anyway.

But as you’ll hear in this episode of The CIO Show, at least one of Australia’s leading property and construction companies was well on its ways to implementing a range of sophisticated digital projects before the pandemic, aimed at improving everything from site management, safety, commercialisation and sustainability. And COVID-19 saw those efforts greatly accelerated and refined as the contagion morphed and spread. 

In this episode, property giant Lendlease’s joint CIOs David Lipscomb and Harvey Worton talk us through their earliest conversations and initial responses to the pandemic as they contemplated its implications for the global business.

As you’ll hear, the company’s digital response was a big success, aided by the fortuitous division of responsibilities; Worton leading infrastructure and the exodus to cloud, with Lipscomb in charge of product development.

But this division has become blurred over time as various important efforts - predating COVID - to bring about company-wide digital transformation take hold.

Everything from how properties are designed before the first shovel hits to the ground to be smarter and more sustainable with regard to energy and water, to the way workers operate and communicate on the ground to be safer and more efficient, is now influenced by digital. 

Concepts that would have seemed foreign just a few years ago like ‘autonomous’ buildings, digital twins and ‘high-fidelity’ development are now part of the everyday language shared between Worton, Lipscomb and their teams as they help chart an exciting new, cleverer future for property and construction.