Digital twin best practices — World Economic Forum

Digital twin for a single property, a portfolio or an entire city? Whatever the scale, there is much to learn from the report in which the World Economic Forum and the China Academy of Information and Communication Technology (CAICT) spent three years gathering insights on best practices for introducing and making use of digital twins in cities.

WEF and CAICT have identified five focus areas for a successful integration of digital twins: Strategy and Talent, Operations and Business, Data and Infrastructure, Platform and Technology, and Application and Scenarios.

Below is a summary of their recommendations for each area, along with Vyer's tips for property owners looking to apply them in practice on their own digital twin journey.

Strategy and talent

Develop a clear strategy and flexible plan for digital twins, with a focus on policies, technologies and resource allocation. Foster collaboration through a multi-stakeholder approach, appoint key roles for digital transformation and implement a competence development system for staff working with digital twin technology.

Vyer's tip — Strategy: Develop a clear strategy for how you will integrate digital twins into your IT environment. Define what success looks like for you, break the process down and set intermediate goals so the transition does not feel overwhelming.

Vyer's tip — Key roles: Property owners are well served by establishing internal digital transformation leads who can drive digitalisation forward and coordinate information sharing between departments and projects.

Vyer's tip — Training: Everyone needs to be included. Investing in the continuous development of your teams and staff is valuable. Staff have different levels of digital maturity — by building a capable workforce, you can manage and fully benefit from your digital twins yourselves.

Operations and business

Establish a sustainable operational model for digital twins, build commercial value through data monetisation and service innovation, and develop cross-sector collaboration to expand the digital twin ecosystem.

Vyer's tip: Start with the use cases that deliver the most immediate value — fault reporting, component inventory, preventive maintenance. Build the business case from real results before expanding the scope.

Data and infrastructure

Build a robust data governance framework, invest in high-quality, standardised data collection, and establish secure and interoperable data-sharing mechanisms.

Vyer's tip: Decide early on what your master data is, where the primary sources are and how they should be connected. The quality of your digital twin depends entirely on the quality of the data it contains.

Platform and technology

Select scalable and interoperable digital twin platforms, leverage AI, IoT and cloud computing, and ensure cybersecurity and data privacy.

Vyer's tip: Choose platforms with open APIs that can connect to the systems you already use. Avoid lock-in — your data should belong to you.

Application and scenarios

Prioritise high-impact use cases, iterate based on real-world feedback, and scale successful pilots to broader implementation.

Vyer's tip: Run a pilot on one or two buildings first. Get operations staff involved from day one — their knowledge and engagement are what make the twin useful in practice.