Digital Engineering with Adam Favaloro
Challenges, Bottlenecks, and the Future
Show notes
Adam Favaloro, a veteran digital leader at GHD, offers insights from his 20+ years in digital engineering. He explains that Digital Engineering (DE) has evolved from merely visualising projects to becoming crucial for optimising civil infrastructure lifecycles, enabling early 3D problem-solving that significantly saves construction time and costs. Adam underscores DE's growing importance for efficient asset management and preventative maintenance post-construction, which he sees as the industry's biggest opportunity for growth. Key challenges include demonstrating DE's return on investment amidst persistent budget constraints, overcoming industry resistance to change, standardising diverse digital practices across multidisciplinary teams, and achieving true data interoperability across different software platforms. He notes a talent gap in mid-career experts (5-15 years experience) due to past outsourcing strategies. For new DE professionals, understanding construction, strong communication (being extroverted), and a drive for continuous innovation are non-negotiable skills. Adam believes AI, machine learning, and cloud collaboration will profoundly shape DE's future, with open Standards being vital yet challenging to achieve.