The New Zealand state of the digital nation

By Robyn Francis | Global Engagement Coordinator | Smart Cities Council

The plan was straight forward - to discuss the digital state of the nation for New Zealand.

The twist: in a red-hot digital market with multiple regional and national initiatives proposed, and underway, it's a challenge to sometimes bring the threads together.

Well, this is Digital Twin Week, in all its diversity and high level of authentic dialogue.

Guests came along to hear about New Zealand's digital journey as it shapes up to be a global digital leader - what is current, what is next and what the challenges are for industry that are being addressed.

This was a fascinating case study on policy leadership, partnership-led best practice and industry buy-in.

This session was be hosted by Aurecon's Digital Practice Leader for New Zealand, Keri Niven, and accompanied by a guest panel including:

● Melanie Tristram | Jasmax

● Greg Preston | Building Innovation Partnership and CoDE NZ

● Jannat Maqbool | Smart Cities Council

In kicking things off, Keri Niven shed some light on the policy context in New Zealand before guests discussed the contribution of the BIM Program and how Code NZ operates. This provided a great segway to look at how policy operates across key issues such as climate change, decarbonisation, health and water and the role of various growth engines such as AI.

In terms of the landscape, the timing is now. With Digital Twin serving as more than an asset - rather an engine that can be ‘sliced and diced’ in many ways - the question now becomes where are the documents and policies providing guidance to industry and are they doing enough to co-create best practice for everyone?

Again, the question of data sharing was raised, coming from the angle of time spent on formatting data for individual project use rather than long-term shared use.

Co-ordinated digital planning across government and sectors, bringing in elements such as fintech and spatial finance as well as the reporting entities and data-sovereignty are certainly topics we look forward to unpacking with the various panel guests in the coming weeks.

A recording of this session will be made available on the Smart Cities Academy website on November 1 2021. Subscribers to the DT Hub will be notified when available.