Digital Services Expert to Propel Black & Veatch's Strategic Growth

Critical infrastructure leader names Brunswick veteran Mike Adams to new chief digital technology officer role

As global engineering and construction leader Black & Veatch designs, builds and maintains increasingly more advanced sustainable infrastructure assets to enable businesses and communities to thrive, it also is generating and leveraging huge amounts of real-time data at a scale and intensity never experienced before. To accelerate the company’s innovation and technology strategy in this fast-expanding digital economy, Black & Veatch has named digital transformation expert Mike Adams to a newly formed role as its chief digital technology officer (CDTO).

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Mike Adams, Black & Veatch chief digital technology officer (Photo: Business Wire)

Adams is tasked with driving leading-edge initiatives to research, validate and adopt emerging technologies that accelerate digital competitiveness across Black & Veatch’s global workforce, operations and diverse portfolio of client-centric solutions. Whether it's digitally enabling worker productivity and safety, tracking carbon emissions or leveraging data-driven insights to create new sources of recurring revenue, the new CDTO’s mission is to ensure that the next generation of Black & Veatch solutions adapt technologies that are innovative and intuitive to use and aligned with creating quantifiable value for employees, clients and partners.

Mike Adams comes to Black & Veatch from Brunswick Corp., where he served as vice president, chief information officer and leader of a digital engineering consulting business. While with that multi-billion-dollar recreational marine company, he successfully guided a large-scale digital transformation that focused on customer experience key performance indicators, including engagement, lead conversion and digitally assisted sales. Before that, Adams served as a DuPont Corp. digital transformation leader accountable for enhancing end user experience, optimizing technology investment and improving service reliability and performance.

Black & Veatch Chairman and CEO Mario Azar said Adams’ deep digital expertise will be invaluable as clients entrust the company not only with their physical infrastructure assets but also more increasingly with their critical datasets across the whole lifecycle from design to build, operate and maintain.

“With our relentless focus on disruptive innovation, safety and project management, Mike will be instrumental in transforming our broad application of advanced technologies – from drones and machine vision to artificial intelligence, digital twins, geographic information systems (GIS) and industrial cybersecurity solutions,” Azar said. “This evolution in role from chief information officer (CIO) to CDTO is a leap to change our view and adoption of technology from an IT tool to an integral part of how we run our business.”

“My mission has always been to strategically align and place the right bets on digital capability best able to advance and deliver transformational change and durable competitive advantage, and I am excited to bring that mindset to Black & Veatch and the clients and communities we serve,” Adams said. “Data is a critical ingredient to durable competitive advantage. It is essential that we both protect it and put it to work.”

Editor’s Notes:

• For a high-resolution image of Mike Adams, click here.
• As Brunswick CIO, Adams was a finalist for the 2023 Chicago ORBIE Awards, which recognize technology executives for leadership, innovation and excellence in that rapidly growing, CIO-led national professional association.
• Adams earned a master’s degree of business administration in international business management from Drexel University in Philadelphia.

About Black & Veatch

Black & Veatch is a 100-percent employee-owned global engineering, procurement, consulting and construction company with a more than 100-year track record of innovation in sustainable infrastructure. Since 1915, we have helped our clients improve the lives of people around the world by addressing the resilience and reliability of our most important infrastructure assets. Follow us on www.bv.com and on social media.

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