The digital thread: how to connect capital to long-term value

Even the most carefully planned capital investments fail to deliver their expected returns. Not because the engineering is wrong, but because the line of sight between decisions and eventual outcomes is lost across the end-to-end lifecycle. 

A digital thread – a continuous connection that runs unbroken through every lifecycle stage – can change that.

Asset-intensive organisations pour billions into infrastructure and capital assets, yet performance often falls short of expectations. Projects run over time and budget. The information generated during design and build never quite makes it to the team running the asset day to day. Once something is commissioned, performance tends to drift and measuring, let alone improving, lifecycle value becomes a guessing game. The result is wasted capital, higher costs, delayed returns and missed opportunities hiding in plain sight.

The scale of the problem is well evidenced. Decades of research into major projects shows that:

• large infrastructure projects routinely experience 30%–70% cost overruns (e.g. transmission ~30%, CCUS ~35%+, nuclear ~115%+)
• schedule overruns of 40%–70% are common across complex energy and infrastructure programmes
• benefits are frequently overestimated or under-realised, particularly in complex or novel projects.

In other words, the issue is not isolated underperformance, it is systemic.

Where value is lost across the project lifecycle

The root cause of these challenges is fragmentation. Early development, delivery and operations teams work in silos, each using different and often disconnected systems, assumptions and datasets. Data is recreated rather than reused. Time is lost reconciling inconsistencies and decision-makers struggle to gain a clear, portfolio-level view of performance or risk. Insights generated in one phase rarely translate into action in the next. As a result, decisions are made on incomplete or outdated inputs, and value is quietly lost across the lifecycle.

The digital thread: a continuous information flow across the lifecycle

Evidence of this fragmentation and disconnect is easy to find in practice. Anyone working in asset-intensive industries will recognise exchanges like this: “Where is the latest baseline recorded and are we reporting against it?” “The contractor’s programme doesn’t align with ours.” “We’re spending more time reconciling data than managing the project.” “Who actually owns this decision?” “Why is this being escalated, shouldn’t the team be able to resolve it?” and “Every project seems to be doing this differently.”

The solution lies in establishing a digital thread: a continuous, connected flow that links a project from the first investment decision all the way through to operational handover and end of life. This thread is not a single system, platform or a dashboard. It is the structured connection between (1) engineering, procurement, delivery and commercial data, (2) cost, schedule and risk, and (3) governance and decision-making across every stage of the lifecycle. In practice, it ensures that what is decided early can be traced, measured and optimised through delivery and into operations.

During feasibility and optioneering, this means modelling scenarios and benefits properly – not just a project’s routing corridor or site selection, but how the physical asset will perform, be maintained and deliver value over the next 20 or 30 years and beyond. During project delivery, it means real-time visibility of cost, schedule and risk – so problems surface before they become crises. At commissioning, it means the knowledge built up by the construction team actually transfers to operations, rather than walking out the door with the contractors.

Once assets are commissioned and operationalised, a well-established digital thread makes proactive management possible. Performance can be monitored, efficiency optimised and issues anticipated rather than reacted to. Maintenance becomes predictive and evidence based, and life extension decisions become calculable rather than speculative.

How AI supports connected decisions…

AI doesn’t replace the digital thread – it amplifies it.

Traditional AI draws on historical data to forecast project and asset performance and maintenance. Generative AI can synthesise messy, unstructured information – incident reports, sensor logs, maintenance records – and surface what matters. Agentic AI goes further still, coordinating actions across systems, so that an insight doesn’t just sit in a report but actually triggers action.

Together, these capabilities move organisations from reactive problem-solving to proactive, value-driven project development, delivery and asset management.

We’re helping one of our clients, a major multinational technology company, explore the opportunity. As a rapid proof of value, we’re applying generative AI to unlock insights from past project data, focusing on identifying and assessing delivery risks. An AI intelligence layer we’ve built on top of the client’s data model turns these insights into actionable learnings, with the potential to enable better and proactive decisions across the end-to-end project lifeycle.

…and unlocks value in a way that isolated systems can’t

What’s often missed is that value doesn’t come from each lifecycle stage working better in isolation. It comes from the connections between them. Decisions made during development shape delivery outcomes and ultimately determine returns. Lessons learned during project delivery and asset operations feed back into the next project investment decision. The result is a compounding effect: knowledge reused, risk understood earlier and capital deployed with greater confidence. This is what isolated tools and systems can never achieve.

Digital as the foundation of modern capital allocation

All this means that digital technology in capital delivery and asset management is no longer a nice-to-have. It's the foundation. The organisations pulling ahead aren't the ones with the most sophisticated models or the most data – but those that connect decisions, data and performance coherently, across the lifecycle.

Realising this ambition isn’t straightforward. It requires bridging analytics and operations in practice – ensuring decisions are explainable, grounded in how assets actually work and meaningful to the people who make commercial decisions. Solutions need to be safe to adopt and scalable across the organisation, not bolted on at the edges. And they require clear governance with defined decision rights, accountable owners at each lifecycle stage, and consistent delivery standards across projects and portfolios. Without that foundation, even the best-connected data will stall at the point of action.

Done well, a digital thread shifts capital delivery from reactive to deliberate. Investments become more defensible, performance more predictable, and the gap between capital committed and value delivered starts to close.