AECOM Australia and New Zealand Appoints Chief Digital Officer

1 December, 2016: Premier integrated infrastructure firm, AECOM has appointed Ms Colette Munro in a new role as Chief Digital Officer to lead its Digital by Design strategy across Australia and New Zealand (ANZ).

Reporting directly to Chief Executive, Australia and New Zealand, Lara Poloni, Colette will join the ANZ executive committee and is making a number of senior hires to accelerate the roll out of the firm’s strategy.

“AECOM is increasingly working right across the design, build, operate and maintain lifecycle of projects and digital solutions are the key to enabling that”, said Ms Poloni. “We are delighted that Colette has agreed to take on this challenging and exciting role as we evolve our business to provide clients with integrated digital solutions.”

“Colette has a broad knowledge of software technologies and a passion for creating digital business value. Her skills and counsel will be invaluable as we leverage disruptive technologies transforming our industry to better deliver for our clients and provide new digitally enabled career paths for our people.”

AECOM’s Building Information Management (BIM) team is already recognised as a leading advisory group in Australia and New Zealand, supporting clients such as the Sydney Opera House and Transport for New South Wales as they transform their digital capability.

Reflecting on her new role, Colette said, “It’s great to be starting from a position of strength in the digital engineering space. We already have teams across Australia and New Zealand leveraging software and data to deliver innovative solutions to our clients.”

“My initial focus will be to sort through the myriad of tools and solutions we are currently using to understand which ones deliver significant client value and expand on those. At the same time, we will continue to transform AECOM into a more efficient digital future for our core Design and Engineering Consulting Business.”

To enable the Digital by Design strategy, Colette Munro has created a new Digital Solutions team that will house around twenty software engineers, developers and data analysts. This team will use a combination of agile and lean methodologies to develop, test and host digital solutions for our clients.

In addition, the Digital by Design strategy includes the establishment of robust IT governance processes and policies to ensure consistency and standards across all AECOM’s operations, clients and projects.

Reflecting on the evolution of the engineering profession Colette said, “For centuries engineers have invented solutions to solve the world’s most complex problems. Today, more and more of those inventions can be delivered digitally in a technology as a service model.”

“Disruption is an essential part of innovation. The way we service our clients in five years’ time will be completely different to how we service them today; we can either disrupt ourselves or risk someone else doing it for us,” concluded Colette.

About Colette Munro
After graduating as an electrical engineer from Newcastle University (New South Wales), Colette started her career as an engineer in the local mining industry. She then moved into technology solutions development and more recently led architecture and software development for the digital customer experience team at Schneider Electric, where she worked across Australia, the US, Europe and South Africa. Colette holds a Masters of Business Administration from La Trobe University.

About AECOM
AECOM is built to deliver a better world. We design, build, finance and operate infrastructure assets for governments, businesses and organizations in more than 150 countries. As a fully integrated firm, we connect knowledge and experience across our global network of experts to help clients solve their most complex challenges. From high-performance buildings and infrastructure, to resilient communities and environments, to stable and secure nations, our work is transformative, differentiated and vital. A Fortune 500 firm, AECOM had revenue of approximately $17.4 billion during fiscal year 2016. See how we deliver what others can only imagine at aecom.com and @AECOM.

Media Contact:
Johnny Sollitt-Davis
Director, External Affairs Australia New Zealand
+61 3 9653 8500
Johnny.Sollitt-Davis@aecom.com