Colin Bell, digital and data director, Kier Construction, asks what happens when we stop thinking about digital as a separate initiative and make it part of how construction projects are delivered every day
For many years, the construction industry has talked about digital transformation as though digital is a dark art that sits alongside the way we deliver projects: a programme, a specialist team, or a collection of technologies that we introduce into established processes.
But perhaps the more pertinent question is: what happens when we no longer need to describe something as digital at all?
That is ultimately the ambition behind our Naturally Digital approach.
For us, becoming naturally digital is not about adopting technology for technology’s sake. It is about reaching a point where the simplest and most effective way of performing specific tasks is also the digital way. Where employees do not have to navigate a complex technology landscape to find the right tool. Where information created during the construction of an asset remains useful throughout its operational lifecycle and where data and AI help people make better decisions rather than simply generating more information.
We are already starting to make that transition in several areas.
Making technology simpler
One paradox of digital transformation is that organisations can inadvertently make work more complicated.
As technology develops, new applications are introduced to solve specific problems. Over time, this can lead to overlapping tools, different approaches between projects, and uncertainty for employees about which technology to use.
Our Naturally Digital approach is challenging that.
We have been developing an agreed core technology stack across our project environment, alongside work to create a digital information portal that provides a clearer route to the technologies, guidance and support people really need. Our objective is to increase standardisation and adoption while reducing ambiguity for users. That sounds simple, but it represents an important philosophical and behavioural change.
Instead of asking every project to build its own digital environment, we can define the right capabilities once, set standards around them, and make them easier for broader projects to adopt. We are also looking at software usage and opportunities to rationalise overlapping applications. Importantly, the business case is not simply about reducing licence costs. We recognise that potentially greater benefits lie in productivity, standardisation, and enabling people to achieve more with the resources available to them. The end state should feel almost invisible to the user. People know where to go, what to use and how to use it.
That is what “naturally digital” should feel like.
Moving from documents towards data
Technology alone, however, only takes us so far.
Our projects create enormous amounts of information, but too much of it can remain locked in individual documents and disconnected systems. The opportunity is to structure and connect the information generated through normal project activity so it can inform decisions elsewhere.
We can already see the beginnings of this across our project environment. Design and information deliverables can connect through our systems into our construction data reporting environment. Bringing project information together in this way gives teams a common view of performance, progress, risks and trends, rather than relying on separate reports and disconnected data sources. The important change is not the dashboard itself, but the ability to spend less time assembling information and more time using it to inform project conversations and decisions. The longer-term opportunity is even more valuable: capturing where problems occur, understanding why they occurred, and feeding that knowledge into future projects so we avoid repeatedly solving the same problems or intervene dynamically to prevent them from occurring in the first place. This changes the role of reporting.
Instead of spending significant effort collecting information, reconciling spreadsheets, and producing retrospective reports, data should increasingly become a by-product of doing the work.
That allows teams to spend less time asking ‘what happened?’ and more time considering ‘what should we do now?’.
Achieving that requires good foundations. Consistent processes, information standards, and auditable, trustworthy data matter as much as dashboards. In our own discussions, the importance of consistent delivery, the right underlying data and an auditable trail have been highlighted as foundational to our Naturally Digital ambition. Without those foundations, increasingly sophisticated technology simply accelerates inconsistency.
AI should reduce workload pressure, not create another workstream
AI then takes our opportunity another step forward.
There is understandable excitement around generative AI, automation, and increasingly intelligent systems. But success shouldn’t be measured by how many AI tools an organisation deploys.
It should be how much unnecessary effort they remove.
The most powerful applications of AI in construction may ultimately be quite ordinary: finding information faster, summarising complex material, automating routine administration, identifying patterns across project data, and helping people make better decisions.
That is why AI cannot sit independently of our work on digital tools and data.
AI is only as useful as the information available to it, the processes surrounding it, and the trust people have in the answers it produces. Equally, adoption must sit within appropriate organisational guardrails. Recent internal consideration of emerging AI capability, for example, has included explicit assessment of data sovereignty requirements rather than assuming every new capability should automatically be enabled. Responsible adoption and innovation are therefore not competing ideas. They are prerequisites for scaling AI successfully and safely.
What changes for our people, projects, and customers?
For employees, the aspiration is straightforward: less friction. Less time searching for information. Fewer duplicate systems. Less manual administration. Clearer processes and easier access to knowledge. Technology creating the capacity for people to apply their judgement and expertise where it matters most.
For projects, naturally, digital delivery creates greater consistency. Rather than innovation depending upon individual projects discovering an application or developing their own approach, proven capability becomes embedded into how projects are mobilised and delivered.
For customers, the opportunity extends beyond construction. Better-structured information and greater data continuity can create a stronger connection between design, construction, handover, and operations. Digital then becomes less about demonstrating innovation during construction and more about providing customers with reliable, usable information about the asset itself, supporting better decisions, more efficient operation and stronger whole-life performance.
The industry challenge is no longer simply technology
Perhaps the biggest lesson is that the next stage of construction’s digital transformation will not be won by technology alone.
Our industry already has access to increasingly sophisticated platforms, sensors, visualisation technologies, automation, and AI. The challenge is integrating those capabilities into the everyday operating model of projects.
That requires us to tackle some less glamorous questions.
How do we standardise without inhibiting innovation? How do we create information once and reuse it rather than repeatedly recreating it? How do we give people the skills and confidence to work differently? How do we connect client, designer, contractor, and supply-chain information rather than creating new digital silos? And how do we measure digital success through improvements in project performance rather than simply technology adoption?
The organisations that answer those questions will move beyond digital transformation towards something more fundamental.
Digital will stop being a programme and become part of how the organisation works. They will be naturally digital.
For us, that is the real opportunity. Success is not a future in which we talk more about digital. It is one in which we increasingly do not need to.
Because when technology, trusted data and intelligent automation are embedded in everyday delivery, being digital is no longer the objective.
It is simply the natural way we work.
