Build a culture that supports digitalisation — Sweco

More and more property owners are investing in digital twins to streamline their operations. To help build understanding of how to make the shift from analogue to digital ways of working as smoothly as possible, we speak with industry practitioners to hear their perspectives. Next up: Viktor Davidov, group manager for PropTech at Sweco.

"What's most exciting right now is that there's a real sense of urgency in the industry — property owners have understood that they need to invest in digitalisation. Several factors have driven this: new talent entering the sector, high interest costs, taxonomy requirements and the sustainability agenda," he says.

Viktor Davidov leads a PropTech and Digital Strategy group at Sweco, focused on helping property owners capture the opportunities that digitalisation offers.

"There are many tools that can accelerate digital transformation, but you also need an organisation that can absorb the technology and understands its value for it to scale. That means training staff and building a culture with processes, ways of working and routines that support digitalisation."

5 tips for property owners embarking on digitalisation

Decide what you are working towards. Do you want to become the most sustainable, the most customer-focused or the most profitable company?

Look at the problems you have today. Can you address them? Do you have the right organisation? Do you have the right people, or do you need to consider entirely new roles?

Find a system that matches your needs. Look at what you have internally today and what you have externally. Do you need a new system? What should it do? When bringing in a new system, aim to be able to remove at least two existing ones.

Put in place processes and activities that support what you want to achieve. If you bring in a system where staff can request drawing updates, you need a process for how to use that system to commission the model updates.

Raise the knowledge level across the organisation. Demonstrate what you are doing continuously, and let staff who were involved early on help train their colleagues.

New processes and ways of working to support the technology

His advice is to first let leadership align on what needs to be done and why, so they can drive it through. Getting the whole organisation on board — which can involve changing how an entire organisation works — is a critical success factor.

"We need to want to use the technology and actually use it. Otherwise it's worthless."