The legacy of Brisbane 2032 will not be measured in medals and memories alone, but in how digital infrastructure and capabilities are woven into everyday life across Brisbane and the broader region.
When the architectural team for Brisbane’s new 63,000-seat Olympic stadium at Victoria Park was announced, it marked the point at which Australia’s most complex infrastructure program began shifting from vision to delivery.
Cox Architecture and Hassell, working with Japan’s Azusa Sekkei, have been appointed to design the stadium for the opening and closing ceremonies and athletics at Brisbane 2032. With earthworks flagged to begin in 2026, decisions are now moving quickly from concept into contracts and construction.
That shift is significant. The window to influence digital outcomes, and to secure a meaningful digital legacy, opens earlier than you might expect, and narrows quickly once delivery accelerates.
When we talk about digital infrastructure, we’re not simply talking about software platforms or systems. We’re talking about the physical and logical components that enable connectivity – fibre into venues, cabling and networks throughout facilities, and the sensors, devices and systems that bring buildings and precincts to life.
Decisions about how information flows, how systems connect, and how future experiences are enabled harden quickly. All depend on underlying connectivity, networks and physical infrastructure that is hard to retrofit once construction is underway across multiple projects and venues.
That’s why the next 12 to 24 months are such a critical window. This is the period when leadership, governance and accountability need to be established, not after problems emerge. The digital decisions made now will shape not just how the Games operate, but what Queensland is left with long after the flame is extinguished.
The two-week trap
When people talk about digital infrastructure, the conversation often jumps straight to platforms, systems and tools. I tend to think about it the other way around.
Before we talk about technology, we need to envision the future experiences we’re trying to support. What should it feel like to be an athlete moving between venues? A volunteer navigating shifts? A commuter travelling through the city? These experiences need to be seamless and consistent.
Once you’re clear on those experiences, digital infrastructure becomes an enabler rather than the focus. Consistent standards, blueprints and connectivity across venues, precincts and communities are what allow those experiences to carry through as people move from one place to another, rather than breaking down at the edge of a site.
The danger with an event like the Games is tunnel vision. It’s easy to focus on whether everything will work for those two weeks in 2032, and much harder to stay disciplined about what comes after. That’s a real trap, because the same foundations that support Games-time operations – transport coordination, venue operations, public safety and accessibility – are expected to support Brisbane’s long-term growth and operation.
If we don’t explicitly design for legacy, we end up building infrastructure that’s optimised for the event itself, but less useful once the spotlight moves on. The question we should be asking now isn’t “What do we need for the Games?” It’s “What do we want this investment to enable in 2033 and beyond?”
While much of the investment for Brisbane 2032 will be concentrated around key venues and precincts, the opportunity, and the responsibility, is much broader than the inner city.
Even today, digital connectivity across South East Queensland is inconsistent. By 2032, network technology will have moved on again. We’re already operating in a 5G environment, and 6G standards will be emerging within the Games timeframe. Higher-capacity networks bring enormous potential, but they also require denser, better-planned infrastructure.
From a legacy perspective, this creates an opportunity to lift the baseline level of digital capability across the entire region. Not just around stadiums, but across transport corridors, activity centres and communities. If digital investment is planned holistically, the benefits of the Games can extend well beyond the event itself, supporting economic activity, accessibility and resilience across South East Queensland.
The missing piece: Digital leadership and coordination
When you look at the scale of infrastructure being delivered for Brisbane 2032, the challenge isn’t capability. Queensland has no shortage of that. The risk is fragmentation.
Digital infrastructure doesn’t align neatly with project boundaries. Venues are delivered by one group, surrounding precincts by another. Local governments are responsible for assets that intersect with state-led investments. Private sector partners are delivering critical components, each working to different scopes, timelines and commercial drivers. Yet the digital layer that connects these assets is expected to function as a single, coherent system.
That’s why digital leadership matters. In this context, it’s about coordinating standards, governance and investment so individual projects contribute to a coherent whole.
At the moment, there isn’t a clear answer to a simple question: who is responsible for coordinating the digital layer across venues, precincts and the broader region? Who is setting the connectivity standards, defining shared blueprints, and ensuring decisions made in one place don’t create problems somewhere else?
One way to address this is through a dedicated digital project management office, with a clear mandate to coordinate digital investment across the Games, align standards early, and reduce the risk of siloed or duplicated outcomes as delivery accelerates.
For a coordinating function like this to work, it needs authority. In practice, that authority often sits with the public sector, although there are also models where this role is delivered through a defined private-sector engagement, in much the same way master planning or blueprinting is commissioned.
The delivery model itself is less important than the intent behind it. What matters is that responsibility for digital coordination is explicit, empowered and established early enough to shape outcomes, rather than attempting to correct them once delivery is already underway.
Doing this well requires more than a mandate. Coordinating digital outcomes at scale demands the ability to move fluidly between strategy and delivery, from setting governance, principles and standards, through to translating those decisions into architectures, requirements and investment roadmaps that individual projects can actually implement.
This is the space we work in at Evinact. We’re typically engaged when organisations are making significant digital, data or infrastructure decisions, and those decisions need to hold together over time. Our role isn’t to prescribe technology choices, but to help leaders establish the foundations that make good decisions repeatable, and poor ones easier to avoid.
That often means clarifying what outcomes really matter, putting the right governance and architectural frames in place, and defining shared principles, standards and decision pathways early, before delivery momentum locks in assumptions that are difficult to unwind.
In practice, this work sits across strategy and governance, enterprise and solution architecture, ICT blueprinting and requirements definition. The aim is to ensure decisions made in one part of an organisation don’t create unintended consequences elsewhere, and that digital investments made today remain coherent, defensible and useful well beyond their initial purpose.
If we don’t establish strong digital coordination early, the infrastructure will still be built. The venues will open. The Games will run. On many measures, it will still be a success. But without deliberate digital leadership, we risk settling for outcomes that are good, rather than optimised.
With delivery underway, the window to make the most of those opportunities is open now – and it won’t stay open for long.
