Senior figures from New Zealand’s construction and infrastructure sector gathered at Christchurch Town Hall recently for a roundtable that was equal parts reflection and provocation, leaving with a shared commitment to break down silos, eliminate preventable rework, and create a future where the country leads the world in infrastructure delivery.
The timing was deliberate. Fifteen years since the Central Recovery Plan set the largest reconstruction effort in New Zealand’s history in motion, the city’s rebuild generation came together not to celebrate, but to ask a harder question — has the collaborative, digital momentum that Christchurch made necessary actually been embedded into how New Zealand builds, or is it fading?
Hosted by construction collaboration platform Revizto, the From Rebuild to Digital by Default event drew architects, engineers, contractors, asset owners and academics for a panel discussion with Brad Sara (Warren and Mahoney), Professor Pamela Bell (Victoria University of Wellington), Farzam Farzadi (Beca, Chair of BIMinNZ National Committee), Glenn Jowett (Beca, co-author of the NZ BIM Handbook), and John Hemi (Hemipro Ltd).
Should BIM adoption be mandatory?
One of the sharpest exchanges centred on whether New Zealand should follow the UK’s lead and make BIM adoption mandatory across the construction industry.
Glenn Jowett, a technical director at Beca who was involved in the BIM Acceleration Committee from its earliest days, reflected on New Zealand’s original decision to pursue a voluntary approach.
“I think at the time we probably made the right call. But the more I reflect, I think we made the wrong decision,” he says.
The UK mandate’s real value, he argues, wasn’t forcing compliance. It was pointing everyone in the same direction and allowing the supply chain to respond consistently.
Farzam Farzadi, also a technical director at Beca and chair of BIMinNZ, the national industry body that produced and continues to steward the NZ BIM Handbook, agrees the root problem is structural. New Zealand ranks in the top 10% of OECD for per-capita infrastructure investment at $4500 per citizen per year, yet sits fourth from the bottom on outcomes.
“We are not focusing on the outcome. We are just focusing on who is going to do what,” Farzadi says.
His answer is to push harder on policy — BIMinNZ is establishing legislation-focused workstreams with a target of engaging future infrastructure and construction ministers within two to three years. The Handbook itself is already referenced internationally, cited in boardrooms as far away as Germany and Saudi Arabia as a model worth emulating.
Procurement and education
A recurring theme at the roundtable was that procurement models, not technology, remain the fundamental barrier. John Hemi, a former productivity director at the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, captures the cultural challenge plainly.
“New Zealanders hate being told what to do. We like to reinvent things ourselves. And I don’t know how we’re going to get over ourselves,” he says.
Professor Pamela Bell, who leads a new construction programme at Victoria University of Wellington, points to education as the key that unlocks the vision, not just for the next generation, but for the current workforce still operating on what was taught 20-plus years ago.
On AI, Brad Sara, digital lead at Warren and Mahoney, urges getting first principles right, clean and structured data, before layering new technology on top — while Farzadi warns the industry is simultaneously overestimating what AI can offer today and underestimating what it will be in five to ten years.
From discussion to action
The panel gave way to structured workshop tables tackling the contractual and regulatory shifts needed to embed digital by default, the price-versus-capability imbalance, whether technology is living up to its productivity promise, and how the industry prepares for AI without losing critical thinking.
Themes that emerged consistently included early contractor involvement, client education, plain language standards, and a production mindset for infrastructure delivery. One table’s summary captured the mood — “Cost doesn’t equal value. That’s pretty key.”
What good looks like in 2030
Closing the panel, each speaker was asked what the headline would be if New Zealand is truly digital by default in 2030:
• Farzadi wants to see the industry shift from procurement to outcomes.
• Hemi describes a New Zealand where uniform standards are simply how projects get delivered.
• Bell envisions a world where words like digital, prefab and modular have disappeared from the conversation, not because the ambition faded, but because it was achieved.
• Jowett wants clients valuing data as their biggest asset, and RFPs where price no longer dominates.
• Sara’s answer was the most pointed — not having to justify the processes the industry already knows work, just having them accepted.
Revizto chief innovation officer Jason Howden closed with a challenge that summed up the day’s intent: “How can we stop treating innovation as a nice to have, and shift it to digital by default, where it’s something we just do as part of our standard operating procedures?
“Everything we’ve practised over the last 10, 15 years has come from people like us, just putting our heads together and going forward.”
The working session that followed gathered written commitments from attendees to support the next phase of the NZ BIM Handbook update. Revizto will work with BIMinNZ to carry that momentum back to the wider industry community, supporting education and awareness, and contributing global knowledge in the shared pursuit of a stronger New Zealand infrastructure delivery model.
