Reporting from the year 2033, Evinact Partner Jon O’Brien looks back at the glorious digital legacy Brisbane 2032 left Queensland, and the decisions that made it possible.
It’s 2033, and Brisbane 2032 is already starting to acquire the strange glow that major events get once they pass into memory.
Of course, we remember the packed stadiums. The records. The volunteers. The moment Robert Irwin rode into the Closing Ceremony on the back of a giant mechanical Lumholtz tree kangaroo, which was a wonderful connection to Matilda who featured in 1982.
But some of the most consequential things the Games left behind are much harder to put in a highlights reel.
Faster, higher, stronger, together
A year on from the Games, some parts of the Brisbane 2032 legacy are impossible to miss. Brisbane Stadium stands at Victoria Park, the National Aquatic Centre has reshaped its corner of Brisbane and upgraded venues continue to serve their communities.
The digital legacy is harder to see, even though people across Queensland now rely on it every day.
To understand that legacy, you have to remember that Brisbane 2032 was always something of a misnomer. Competition and supporting infrastructure stretched through Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and regional Queensland.
Athletes, officials, spectators, broadcasters and emergency services all had to participate in what felt like one Games, even when the people and places involved were hundreds of kilometres apart.
Just look at Rockhampton. Hosting rowing and canoe sprint events on the Fitzroy River meant providing a Games-standard digital environment in a location with very different physical and telecommunications conditions from an inner-Brisbane venue. Athletes and officials needed reliable communications, broadcasters needed to move large volumes of data and spectators still expected digital services to work.
Being hundreds of kilometres from Brisbane couldn’t mean accepting a second-tier digital experience.
The same challenge played out across venues, precincts and transport networks. To the user, they were part of the same experience, even when responsibility sat with different organisations.
The communications and operational capabilities strengthened for Brisbane 2032 now support disaster response, public safety and major-event coordination across Queensland, giving agencies a stronger shared view of what’s happening and helping them respond together as conditions change.
In regional Queensland, connectivity improved for Games venues and live sites has continued to support visitors, local businesses and communities long after the event itself, closing the gap between the quality of their digital access and what those in major cities had always taken for granted.
In solving for the Games, Queensland found itself solving for the state.
How we got here
From our vantage point in 2033, this digital legacy can look like it was almost inevitable. It wasn’t.
Five decisions made well before the Games changed what Brisbane 2032 was able to leave behind.
We put someone in charge
Delivering Brisbane 2032 involved an Organising Committee, delivery bodies, councils and state agencies, all with different mandates and priorities.
What was initially missing was someone with authority to look across them and take responsibility for the digital legacy as a whole.
That’s why Queensland established a single accountable executive function within government to do exactly that. It had responsibility for developing the Digital Legacy Strategy, coordinating investment across agencies and prioritising capabilities that would deliver value across government rather than within a single project or portfolio.
That authority mattered when priorities were in conflict, investments crossed agency boundaries or opportunities sat between existing mandates. It kept the digital legacy an active program concern rather than an aspiration on the edge of Games delivery.
We published a long-term digital and data strategy
Ownership established accountability. A long-term Queensland digital and data strategy set the direction.
The strategy looked 15 to 20 years beyond the Games, setting out the capabilities Queensland wanted to build, retain and keep developing well after 2032.
That longer horizon changed the way Games-related investments were assessed.
A communications upgrade could be considered for the value it would continue to create for the surrounding community. Common standards could be designed with wider government use, like public safety in mind. Sensors, analytics and digital twins developed for Games infrastructure could continue to support asset monitoring, maintenance and future planning.
The strategy also gave agencies, councils and delivery partners a shared frame, allowing individual projects to test their digital choices against the capabilities Queensland wanted to retain after the Games.
We created a common operational capability
A distributed Games also required a way to support a shared view of what was happening across venues, networks and agencies.
Queensland created a statewide operational platform that could bring together relevant information from venues, transport networks, public spaces, infrastructure and agencies to support real-time situational awareness.
Agencies continued to operate their own technology, while the platform allowed authorised users to draw together the information they needed for a particular operational purpose.
During Brisbane 2032, that gave the people responsible for transport, security, public safety and Games operations a stronger common operating picture of what was happening, even when events were unfolding in different parts of the state.
A year later, the same capability is helping Queensland coordinate disaster response, major events and disruptions across transport and infrastructure networks.
We made information sharing possible
That operational platform depended on more than technical interoperability.
Queensland also needed the legislative, governance and information-management arrangements that would allow information to move across organisational boundaries, including between government, industry and delivery partners.
Organisations needed to know what could be shared, with whom, for what purpose and under what authority. Privacy, security, stewardship and accountability had to be established before the Games began, so those questions were not being resolved for the first time during a live incident.
The result was a more consistent statewide framework for information sharing.
In 2033, emergency services and government agencies have clearer pathways for sharing relevant information when they need to coordinate, with the safeguards and responsibilities already understood.
We established a Digital PMO early
The final piece was a Digital Project Management Office (Digital PMO) to coordinate digital decisions across the delivery program.
It was a lean, specialist function coordinating venue and precinct teams, government, councils, telcos and delivery partners.
The PMO maintained visibility across digital projects, identified gaps and duplication, developed shared standards and blueprints and helped translate those standards into procurement, design and delivery requirements.
And its real value was getting there while those decisions could still be influenced. Common requirements could be built into projects from the outset, dependencies identified and incompatible approaches corrected before they became expensive to unwind.
From our vantage point in 2033, that looks like one of the smartest decisions Queensland made.
Of course, there is one fairly important detail I’ve left out until now. And it’s a little awkward.
Today, it’s not actually 2033.
It’s September 2026.
Robert Irwin has not, to the best of my knowledge, commissioned a giant mechanical tree kangaroo yet, and the digital legacy I’ve described here is still ours to create.
I’ve spent more than 20 years working across large and complex ICT environments, including major-event planning and response for the G20 and Commonwealth Games. I now sit on the Committee for Brisbane’s Games, Legacy and Growth Sub-Committee. If there’s one thing that experience has taught me, it’s that coordination works best when it starts before anyone desperately needs it.
The digital infrastructure, technology and operating arrangements Brisbane 2032 will rely on are already being shaped years before the event. The opportunity is to make sure those decisions add up to more than a successful few weeks.
That’s why Evinact is putting these ideas forward now. We help organisations establish the governance, standards, architectures and delivery requirements that allow complex digital programs to work across organisational boundaries. For Brisbane 2032, that means turning digital legacy from an ambition into something that can be coordinated and delivered.
The future I’ve described here isn’t a given. But it is plausible, and Queensland has a rare opportunity to use the demands of Brisbane 2032 to build digital capability the state will value for years to come.
And if we do the things I’ve recommended here, the only embarrassing thing about this article in 2033 will be how conservative its predictions were.
