‘Building the present, creating the future’
After Martin outlined the Netherlands' largest construction company with its many operating companies, enterprising people and diverse client groups, he showed attendees BAM's new reality, versus traditional construction company. Inspired by Simon Sinek's What-How-Why to create the infrastructure of the future, BAM's new image is about people's connectivity. The big common denominator, the Why, is to understand the context of the customer as well as the client and put the customer at the centre of a digitally driven business. In short: the B2B4C model. Here, using dominant information is essential to provide insights, implement improvements or close new tenders. With concrete examples on the ‘agile app delivery’ project (the roll-out of smart meters), the Connectivity Lab and the associated success factors and learnings, there was much interaction with the attendees. 

These discussions were further fuelled by the statements brought in, e.g. ‘Digital is seen as the enabler and should be organised as close to the business as possible’. On this, most appeared to agree with each other, with one of the motivations clarifying ‘If you want to make speed, you have to differentiate’. 

Next to speak was Hans Aalbers, CIO of Dura Vermeer. He outlined the impact of virtual building within the construction industry and how this BIM Model (Building Information Modeling) has started to work within Dura Vermeer and awakened I]innovative thinking. With their clear strategic focus on supporting daily work with BIM and exploiting the opportunities of (big) data are the ingredients of success. The role of the ICT organisation here is to inspire and put the customers' needs at the centre. Thus, the picture of the ‘construction site of the future’ (see also header image) was sketched with the use of AI, augmented reality, drones, unmanned trucks and robots. Finally, several lessons learned were shared that are of great importance during the journey of digital transformation. 

Digitising with machine learning & AI
As a third source of inspiration, Victor Pereboom, co-founder and CTO of start-up Dutch Analytics, explained how intelligent systems can recognise relationships and patterns from exponential amounts of data. Where insights and predictability are then created to make better decisions. Step by step, he took attendees through the case of BAM Infra Rail on how they can monitor the behaviour of assets. Based on the insights, breakdowns due to points failures can be predicted in order to control and carry out preventive maintenance. . A good business case, devoting sufficient time to the experimental phase in which data preprocessing and analysis is continuous, and maintaining short lines between data scientist and domain experts to have output checked were some of the cliff hangers from this story. 

What emerged from all three contributions was that no matter how good the plans and improvements are, if the organisation is not (yet) ready for the change, it is even harder work! Choose the path of digital transition that suits your organisation. During the drinks, CIOs, their peers and IT professionals all working at one of the CIO Platform members were able to further inspire each other and share experiences. Once again, we look back on a Theme Session that provided the necessary inspiration and food for thought.