Built for Value

The argument

We are the only industry that designs the world it then has to live in. We are the authors and we are the users. No other industry has a better reason to get the work right.

We all have to stand in the building, sit in the hospital, and use the infrastructure that we or our colleagues have built. A surgeon does not have to take their own bad prescription. An auditor does not have to invest in the company they signed off. Every other profession has an escape from its own bad work. We do not, and that is exactly why it is worth doing properly.

The spine

One sentence, and everything else is evidence for it

We create a digital copy of our built asset only when there is business value in doing so.

That is not a modest claim. It cuts against most of what is currently sold, demonstrated and approved under the word "twin". If nobody can name the decision the copy improves, the copy should not be built, however impressive it looks on a screen.

This book is about built assets across their whole life: infrastructure, networks, estates, the systems that keep them running. It is written for the people who sign off the money, not the people who write the code.

What it is not

Three books this deliberately is not

Not
A collection of success stories

The built environment does not scale or replicate. Every asset, site and owner is different, so "it worked there" is no promise it works here. A case study proves something happened once, under conditions you do not share. The principles travel. The success stories do not.
Not
A technology manual

There is no platform comparison, no architecture diagram, no vendor scorecard. The questions that decide whether a twin pays are commercial questions, and they are answered before anyone opens a piece of software.
Not
A playbook to copy

I refused to write one for years, on the grounds that anyone who follows a manual step by step has already skipped the judgement that makes it work. The final chapter is called "Your playbook, not mine", and it means it.

Who it is for

Anyone who sponsors, approves or sells this work

Asset owners and operators
Engineering firms
Design practices
Contractors
Facilities and maintenance
Technology vendors

You do not need to be technical. You do need to be the person who has to defend the number. The book is written in plain English, deliberately, because most of the people who have to make these decisions are not reading in their first language, and the profession's failure to explain value is its own fault rather than theirs.

The author

Cristina Savian

Founder and Managing Director of BE-WISE, advising engineering firms, asset owners and technology vendors on digital transformation across the built environment. Twenty-eight years across civil engineering and technology, and a long habit of being called in after the twin has already disappointed somebody.

That vantage point shapes the book. Successful projects do not call. The failures do, and they turn out to fail in patterns.

Industry events spoken at 60+ in 15 countries
Licensed Building and Land Surveyor
Executive MBA University of Cambridge
MSc, Transport and Business Management Imperial College London

Taught at

The University of Hong Kong · UCL, Bartlett School of Construction · University of Melbourne · Western Sydney University · Northumbria University

Boards and industry positions

nima, International Ambassador · Institution of Engineering and Technology, Digital Twin Lead on the Built Environment Panel · Digital Twin Consortium · Australasia BIM Advisory Board, Asset Management Working Group · Centre for Digital Built Britain, Digital Twins International Working Group

Read chapter one first

One sentence, and everything else is evidence for it

Three books this deliberately is not

A collection of success stories

A technology manual

A playbook to copy

Anyone who sponsors, approves or sells this work

Cristina Savian