In 2021, after years of collaboration with government and industry, the Smart Cities Council launched a groundbreaking draft Digital Twin Blueprint. The initiative aimed to ignite a vibrant digital twin marketplace across Australia and New Zealand, enabling smarter decision-making for the built and natural environments. This framework was designed as a freely available, collaborative resource, rather than a rigid strategy, to shape policies, empower stakeholders, and foster innovation in planning, managing, and delivering services.
Since then, a Digital Twin Maturity Task Force emerged to build on this work by introducing the Digital Twin Maturity Matrix. Leading this charge is Keri Niven, Chair of the Task Force and a Digital Principal at Aurecon New Zealand. With over 25 years of international experience in engineering, geospatial technology, and digital transformation, Keri is uniquely positioned to guide these critical discussions.
The Digital Landscape: Progress and Challenges
Keri describes her role as encompassing broad responsibilities, from supporting digital capability uplift and innovation at Aurecon to engaging with clients and partners to understand industry-wide challenges and opportunities. Increasingly, Keri works with clients who are leveraging digitisation activities as a mechanism to improve asset management and drive improved operational asset performance. Digital twins have become a significant part of these conversations. “We’ve seen growing activity across sectors, from project-level pilots to organisation-wide implementations,” Keri notes.
While there’s no shortage of enthusiasm, foundational issues like data standards, governance, whole-of-asset and whole-of-project lifecycle information management remain under-discussed. According to Keri, these “unsexy but essential” elements are critical for long-term success:
“Maturity isn’t about buying a twin off the shelf; it’s about taking ownership—understanding your data, structuring it thoughtfully, and aligning it with your strategy so that it underpins organisational imperatives.”
Measuring Maturity and Delivering Value
The Task Force’s focus on maturity involves more than developing technical metrics and publishing arbitrary maturity measurement indices. The intention is to create a framework through which organisations can benchmark their current capability against key maturity areas such as strategy alignment, funding and value capture, connectivity and technical capability. Leveraging the ever-growing body of knowledge from organisations who have invested in digital twins, the use of a consistent framework could be used to assist planning and decision making for organisations considering investment, as well as helping current twin owners continue to refine and mature. The breadth of industries represented by maturity taskforce participants shows that there is considerable value in sharing knowledge across sectors. There are also collective benefits to be gained at a national level when the barriers to entry for creating digital twins are lowered and more consistent approaches are adopted.
To better reflect the multiple factors that influence and impact the development of a digital twin the Task Force has developed a ‘matrix’ that reflects the capabilities that should be evident at different levels of maturity against these key factors.
This approach recognises the shift toward outcome-based assessments where value can be measured against more than just technical capability. As Keri says, “It’s not just about whether you have a data or simulation twin. It’s about whether your twin provides the right information to solve problems and deliver organisational value.”
The Task Force explores how as organizations mature, they evolve from a focus on basic data capture in pilot projects, to longer term investment programmes aligned to key organisational capability shifts. It also assessed the degree to which technology change influences maturity, where integration and process automation activities are beginning to include semi-autonomous digital twins powered by AI.
However, Keri cautions against overhyping AI as a mechanism to shortcut digital twin development without a strong data foundation: “AI, like digital twins, relies on robust data. If your foundation isn’t solid, your results will be questionable. The connection between digital twins and AI will be powerful, but nonetheless still defined by organisational maturity and the ability to critically assess outcomes.”
The Road Ahead
The Task Force plans to engage with practitioners, exploring functional outcomes, foundational capabilities, and shared learnings. Their goal is to now release the Maturity Matrix for industry comment and testing, which will be captured in a series of conversations at events and online.
So, who needs to join these conversations? Keri stresses inclusivity:
“To build the most complete picture, everyone needs to be at the table—public and private sectors, professional bodies, and beyond. The original blueprint captured where we were; now we need to define where we’re going.”
Join the Conversation
Want to hear more from Keri Niven about the evolving role of digital twins and the path to maturity? Don’t miss her roundtable at the 4th Annual Digital Built World Summit, happening in Sydney on 18-19 February. Explore how digital twins, data insights, and AI are reshaping industries, and discover how your organisation can lead the charge.
Register now to secure your spot and be part of the future of digital innovation.
