Building a National consensus: Why Customer Stewardship matters

The role of the customer in infrastructure is
increasingly becoming centre stage. Technology is
empowering not only the customer voice through
social media; new contestants are offering data
enhanced products and services that are disrupting
traditional models. This is helping to rapidly dismiss
old assumptions that infrastructure users are passive
and homogeneous, as opposed to being dynamic and
highly differentiated customers.

While intuitively appealing to stakeholders, the ways
and means of making customer-led infrastructure
a universal working reality for the sector are
unclear. This situation does not reflect stagnation
or indifference to new initiatives; instead this Policy
Outlook Paper has identified a rich diversity of
practice, outcomes and maturity across all sectors
of infrastructure in Australia.

Policymakers and industry in Australia continue
to wrestle with the best way to proceed. On
the one hand it is acknowledged more market
efficiency is needed in infrastructure, while on
the other there are calls for more government
intervention, with national project lists based on
bureaucratic processes that are accompanied with
claims of market failure demanding even more
public intervention.