Mining Reimagined: Future business architectures

In our recent reports, we explored the large-scale drivers impacting the mining industry and the way its people make decisions on strategy, innovation and organisational architecture. We know the industry must transform under growing pressure to decarbonise and that technological advancements are paving the way for industry disruption. We also know that the way value chains are designed and operated will change, as will the role of people and their structures within an organisation. What we don’t know is what those changes will ultimately look like in practice. While the purpose of a business might stay the same, the way it operates will change substantially.

This thought process has fostered a series of ideas, which have evolved into the paper presented here. Our aim is to bring together the insights gathered from survey data, interviews and various workshops to explore how future mining business architectures may emerge. We examine mining businesses through the lens of the different business purposes typically found in the industry: an explorer, an operator and a processor business. Each of these will experience their own unique challenges and will respond to these in different ways. In an effort to understand the potential shifts from the current known to the future unknown, we have defined the typical elements that comprise businesses architecture and examined these through the lens of both the key external drivers and our current survey data. The result is a set of potential changes to business architecture we hope inspires you to think critically about the future of the industry and what your business strategy may look like.