Digital Construction Power Players 2025: part 4

The MIH team recognised that the hub will need to work for the huge number of SME construction product manufacturers, as well as the major groups.

Small has promoted the hub to both the UK government and Construction Products Europe, in both cases with favourable feedback.

There should be an MVP of the hub later this year. Further announcements about the MIH are expected at Digital Construction Week.

We wanted someone on this list to represent Women in BIM (WiB) and its global reach. We also wanted someone to represent upskilling and education. So we’ve picked Willow Williams, who was recently named global education lead at WiB.

She’s passionate about expanding access to digital construction education across all career stages, from early exposure to lifelong learning. Her WiB role focuses on developing initiatives that connect, inspire and empower individuals globally, with a strong emphasis on promoting diversity, digital literacy and future-ready skills within the built environment.

Williams walks the talk: she is the founder of ThreadPoint Studio, a digital storytelling and education initiative focused on making the world of data, infrastructure and technology accessible to the next generation through imaginative learning experiences.

Oh, and her day job? She’s a client-side BIM manager at Colt Data Centre Services, which designs, builds and operates data centres.

When lawyers talk, business leaders listen; when May Winfield talks, construction leaders listen twice as hard.

Her role at Buro Happold allows Winfield to combine her professional passion for the law with a personal passion for technology.

She is also chair of IM4Legal, the nima interest group that maintains a watch over the interface of information management and the law. In a webinar last year, Winfield warned the audience: “Sometimes you will see in scope or in the contract itself, ‘I want BIM.’ ‘I want a 3D model.’ The trouble with this is it doesn’t actually mean anything. If you have a room of 50 people, and ask each of them, ‘what does a BIM model actually mean, what should it contain?’, everyone’s going to have a different answer.”

And such vague terminology can lead to an argument as to whether the contract has been fulfilled or whether payment is due or not, she noted.

Winfield has broadened the scope of her expertise in the wake of the AI explosion and contributed to the Chartered Institute of Building’s AI Playbook. “Saying the AI got it wrong is like saying the dog ate my homework,” she memorably warned on a webinar organised by this writer two years ago.

The National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) brings together the former Infrastructure and Projects Authority and the National Infrastructure Commission.

According to the government, NISTA will “support delivery of our roads, railways, schools and hospitals… it will help overcome the barriers to delivery of UK infrastructure, as well as provide expertise on private finance and implementing the 10-year infrastructure strategy”.

Leading NISTA from June, as CEO, will be Becky Wood. She joins from EY where she was a partner and sustainable infrastructure leader. Perhaps more pertinently, her career includes stints overseeing major infrastructure developments at the Department for Transport, serving as the senior responsible officer for the Crossrail, Thameslink and Intercity Express programmes.

Wood and NISTA thus represent the government’s major project procurement and delivery arm. With such a huge scope, NISTA’s approach to information management and project management could have a far-reaching impact on construction as a whole. Where it leads (if it leads – and we hope it will), the rest of public sector procurement and project delivery could follow.

It’s worth noting that NISTA will have oversight of the PFI handback challenge, which represents an enormous opportunity for information management and digital construction to prove its worth to UK plc.

That’s right, we’re not naming a 20^th Power Player: we’re asking you to. Email the editor with your nomination: we’ll need their name, job title, who they work for and a couple of sentences justifying their position as a Power Player. We’ll publish the best nominations in mid-June.

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