About Steven Yule

I am Steven Yule, a chartered civil engineer based in Dubai. I lead digital, data and AI work for infrastructure at director level. For 17 years I have worked in the Gulf and the UK on making technology useful once it meets a live capital programme.

I have built and led teams in digital strategy, data engineering, data science and software delivery. I also ran a regional digital and data practice. That meant answering for its growth as well as the quality of its work. Running a practice taught me to judge a digital idea on two counts. Will it work on a real asset? Can the organisation buy it and afford to run it for years? The second question is usually the harder one.

Most digital capability stalls in the same place. It is proven in a pilot and treated as finished because it worked once. The real test is whether a live programme can depend on it. I spend most of my time on that gap. It is usually settled earlier than people expect, in the procurement and in who owns what at handover. Large owners meet the same gap at portfolio level. Each development can be relied on alone while the portfolio as a whole misses its range.

The clearest example in my own work is Riyadh. As project director with the Riyadh Infrastructure Projects Center, I led the first integrated infrastructure plan for the region. It brought the works programmes of more than 20 government and utility bodies into one plan covering thousands of projects. Road space and working time could then be booked once by agreement. Until then they had been contested site by site. The plan is publicly credited with preventing more than 5,000 conflicts between their works.

The work is commissioned in three ways. An independent review gives an owner a written opinion on a decision before it is confirmed. Continuing advisory covers decisions that keep arriving over months. A non-executive or board appointment is for challenge that has to happen in the boardroom. A review is the simplest place to start. All three are described under Work.

My background covers transport, utilities, smart cities and the built environment. It also covers data-centre enablement and asset-heavy capital programmes in the UK and the Gulf.

I am a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers (CEng FICE), an ICE Policy Fellow and the ICE UAE Country Representative. I am also a Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (FCIHT) and a member of the Institute of Asset Management (MIAM). I am a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Engineers and a non-executive director of Thomas Telford Ltd.