Meet the Innovation Group Award finalists in the 2022 iTnews Benchmark Awards

Innovation is an overused term, especially in the world of IT projects. But meaningful digital innovation remains important for organisations dealing with changing markets and strategic threats and opportunities.

Today we announce the two Innovation Group Award finalists in the 2022 iTnews Benchmark Awards:

• The Emerging Technology team at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia
• Lendlease Podium

The projects are featured in the latest in our series of mini-documentaries about the 2022 iTnews Benchmark Awards finalists.

The Emerging Technology Team at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Each year, CBA’s Emerging Technology Team aims to deliver 30 new experiments – it also aims to implement 18 percent of the new solutions it validates.

Its projects include the Execution Health Score, a machine learning model for analysing project management data to predict the likelihood of gold or platinum milestone slippages in the bank’s project and program delivery framework. The work spanned the project’s inception, collection and understanding of data, building and validating machine learning models and generating insights for the business. This helping the bank be more proactive in managing projects.

The team’s previous achievements include an IT Risk Stability Score, which uses a CBA-developed machine learning model to predict the likelihood of high priority incidents across the bank's technology state. The bank won the Best Finance Project Award in the 2021 iTnews Benchmark Awards for this project.

The emerging technology team includes 20 people who work throughout the bank, building new software systems and algorithms and partnering with startups and delivery partners to validate the use of their technology inside the bank – while ensuring that this work is connected to the bank’s strategic priorities.

The team also uses an Emerging Technology Readiness Level Framework to articulate the different stages needed to ideate and develop concepts about how technology could be used, and conduct proof of concepts and production pilots before seeing the technology become production ready.

It is also involved in more exploratory work related to quantum computing, distributed ledgers and other technologies.

Lendlease Podium

Lendlease Digital is part of the global property and investment group Lendlease. It has ambitions to improve the use of digital systems in the construction industry, to improve the industry’s productivity and the experiences of people using buildings.

Underpinning its work is Lendlease Podium, a digital platform designed to modernise the design, construction and operation of buildings. By creating multiple designs and assessing the performance of those buildings, Podium is intended to speed up the creation of buildings and optimise outcomes in terms of performance, sustainability, occupants’ experiences and other factors.

The goal is also for Podium to link data about everything from the way buildings are managed to how they perform, and feed that back into designs. The business sees this connecting of each part of the property value chain – development, construction and operation – as unique to its approach. It also wants industry partners to connect their own digital solutions to its platform.

In the pilot phase Lendlease Digital claims Podium significantly reduced design time and construction duration. Optimising construction sequences in a multi-story apartment building reduced schedules by 45 days and resulted in $2 million of construction cost savings, according to the business.

Watch the mini-documentary series

Thank you to every organisation that entered the Innovation Group Award category. This award attracted many impressive entries, but not all focussed enough on the innovation group or function within their organisation. If your entry is not a finalist, it does not mean it was without merit.

Watch the rest of the mini-documentaries about the 2022 iTnews Benchmark Awards finalists’ projects here throughout early April.

On June 15, the award winners will be announced at a ceremony and dinner hosted by KPMG in Barangaroo, Sydney.

Thank you to Workato for sponsoring the Innovation Group Award.