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Digital Economy By Pang Soo Mooi
The impact of digitalisation on the transformation of engineering practices is unprecedented and swift . The Government recognises the importance of keeping in step with such technological leaps . The launch of the Malaysian Digital Economy and the National IR 4.0 Policy is timely and the right move . A statistician mentioned that businesses also need to re-examine their operation model and explore new opportunities through digitalisation as well as consider accelerating the adoption of digitalisation to increase their resilience while optimising business processes . As we attempt to uplift the digitalisation effort for local industry , including engineering firms , it is important to update ourselves on what and how others in the region look at digitalisation .
Digital Transformation : Engineers need to keep pace – Institution of Civil Engineers
An exponential increase in computing power over the past 50 years has transformed the infrastructure lifecycle . Professionals expect to be able to monitor and update information in realtime , through intuitive interfaces .
Rather than base-line project schedules being batch-processed on room-sized computers , now smaller , cheaper devices and the use of digital information and analytics have become pervasive across the use , operation and delivery of infrastructure .
This brings both opportunities and challenges in managing the innovation and interdependencies associated with this digital transformation .
a . Decision for the whole life asset First , there is an opportunity to see projects as interventions in civil infrastructure systems . Owners and operators of infrastructure , for example in water and transport , are beginning to make investment decisions in relation to total costs rather than capital or operational expenditure .
Digital information enables them to make decisions that consider changes in patterns of use , maintenance and new build solutions , with alliancing approaches enabling the supply chain to be engaged in the discussion of outcomes before the outputs of a project are defined . The Digital Built Britain agenda is starting to consider this wider context of digital information .
b . Real-time decision making As digital data sets get larger , running into millions of documents on the largest projects , it gets harder for engineers and managers involved in delivery to overview and understand aspects of the infrastructure design .
There are opportunities to automate existing approaches to identify interdependencies in complex systems and to develop new collaborative visualisation approaches to enable engineers to have more informed conversations before making decisions .
c . Asset vs technological life cycle Infrastructure owners and operators will need to develop strategies to store digital information and integrate and use different generations of sensor technology , robotics , continuous survey , visualisation and data analytic technologies .
Capturing the AI Dividends - James Lambert
In the race to become the leader in artificial intelligence , China and the US are way ahead of the rest of the world . What does that mean for the other countries ? Will these two global technology giants soak up the AI economic dividend all for themselves ?
60 VOL 89 JANUARY-MARCH 2022