With the goal of speeding up innovation and contributing to the digital transformation of infrastructures and services, Ferrovial has created the Digital Hub. Its focus is to drive, hand in hand with cross-departmental businesses and management teams, new business opportunities, and to promote digital skills and a digital culture within the company.
It’s hard to imagine our lives without digital technology. We have all, with varying levels of difficulty, learnt to send text messages, share photos, watch videos, buy in stores, order and pay for taxis or hotels, through our mobile phones, computers or laptops. And these are just a few examples.
Just like people, companies are adapting to this new environment through a process which has been labelled digital transformation. With the aim of taking advantage of the opportunities digitalization offers, Ferrovial has created the Digital Hub, a meeting point in which to research and experiment with digital trends that might contribute new sources of revenue and improve operations at the company.
The Digital Hub has a team of experts in innovation, technologies and emerging trends (the Internet of Things, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Drones, 3D Printing and Customer Experience), who are working alongside business units in order to identify and execute new opportunities for development. In fact, it does not have a defined hierarchical structure, butrather is based on a cross-departmental collaborative model: working groups are created in which employees from all departments of Ferrovial work on a specific project. Furthermore, it benefits from the collaboration of external experts.
Our goal is to bring together the best in digital talent, both internal and external, in order to promote digital skills and a digital culture within the company, and to create digital solutions which contribute added value to what our businesses provide
Overseen by the General Department of I.T Systems and Innovation, the Digital Hub enjoys the support of the company’s business units, which contribute their knowledge to help identify opportunities and introduce solutions, that of the General
Department of Human Resources, being in charge of managing and developing digital talent at the company and for incorporating external talent, as well as that of the different teams within the General Department of I.T Systems and Innovation itself.
The Digital Hub currently finds itself immersed in four main areas of research: positioning users as the centre of infrastructures and services (for instance, with Ferrovial Airports in the Digital Passenger Experience); attaining a greater level of efficiency by collecting data through sensors (the Internet of Things) or public sources, and its analysis through Big Data (for example in the routes study with Cintra or on energy efficiency in collaboration with Ferrovial Services); advanced analysis and the skills-training of employees in digital technologies alongside Human Resources; and research into technologies and trends which may have an impact our businesses (such as the use of 3D printing, wearable technology with Ferrovial Agroman).
The Digital Hub brings to the fore Ferrovial’s commitment to innovation (one of its five values), and reaffirms its leading role in the digital transformation of the infrastructures and services sector. The company’s point of departure is that of an advantageous position, having many years of experience in innovation, successful businesses and many technological skills, which bodes well for the success of the projects being developed within this new space.
