Systems approach to infrastructure delivery can't work without proper data-sharing, experts warn

The infrastructure sector risks falling far behind the technological curve if its leaders don’t fully adopt systems thinking and recognise their own IT knowledge gaps.

So said Andrew McNaughton, the Atomic Weapons Establishment’s executive director of infrastructure projects delivery, at the first meeting of the ICE Engineering Excellence Community Forum.

The institution invited a select group of infrastructure experts, leaders and clients to the session to discuss how best to tackle the sector’s key challenges.

While engineers have been using advanced tech such as digital twins for years, some attendees expressed concern at the sector’s apparent unwillingness to share enough comparable data.

One of them was the session’s chair, Julie Wood, a Mott MacDonald Fellow and ICE Vice President.

“We civil engineers have a responsibility to champion a system-of-systems mindset – one that fosters interoperability and connectedness across infrastructure,” she said.

Do the foundational work now to achieve desirable outcomes

“The pace of technology will never be this slow again,” warned McNaughton, who was recently elected to serve as an ICE Vice President from November 2025.

In 2020, he chaired the review that spawned an ICE report entitled A Systems Approach to Infrastructure Delivery and the implementation guide that followed.

These publications advised the sector to consider the wider outcomes of each project as much as the assets being built – a key element of systems thinking.

“We’re leading ever more dispersed and diverse teams,” McNaughton said. “We need to be humble and self-aware enough as leaders to know the extent of our capabilities and what support we’ll need.”

Mark Enzer, another Mott MacDonald Fellow, urged infrastructure professionals to make data and digital connections part of their remit, just as they would the physical connections of a road network.

He argued that doing the “boring, foundational, hard work” to make infrastructure data more coherent would enhance the sector’s ability to deliver desirable socioeconomic outcomes.

The ICE’s new Engineering Excellence Community Forums assemble experts to discuss issues such as how to improve infrastructure productivity, an area for which the ICE is sponsoring a new British standard. The publicly available specification (PAS) is expected to be published in 2026.

If you’re interested in helping your sector to work smarter, the ICE has some places left for delegates at Inspiring Engineering Excellence, its free hybrid conference on 2 July.