About

Talking Infrastructure was created in 2016 by Dr Penny Burns and colleagues, Jeff Roorda, David Hope, Gregory Punshon and Ruth Wallsgrove to address a problem that Penny and Jeff had identified a few years earlier — the need to move beyond the management of current portfolios so that decisions made today for new infrastructure will be ‘fit for the future’.   David Hope is now an Advisor to the Board and Lou Cripps has joined as a Board Director.  Board Profiles can be found HERE.

This year, 2024, Dr Penny Burns and Ruth Wallsgrove will lead the ’40 year celebrations’ of our discipline that started in 1984.  All these Events can be found on the AM40! page.

Our latest thoughts can be found in Our Platypus Diaries where we encourage commentary.  

Current Main Research Areas

  • practical methods for addressing resilience and avoiding environmental damage from our infrastructure;  and improved accounting for disaster recovery.  This work is based in the Blue Mountains and supported by a team of international specialists. 
  • forseeing the future – preparing for the impact of demographic, social and environmental change.  This is an extension of The Waves framework.
  • chronicling our history and development, before it disappears from our memories

We have produced three books that should be in every Asset Manager’s library

Books

Of particular value is Building an Asset Management Team by board directors, Ruth Wallsgrove and Lou Cripps, a valuable and very readable guide to selecting your team. Their recognition that many different aspects of Asset Management need to be developed and co-ordinated led to the adoption of the Platypus as our Association’s logo.

The relationship between people and data is developed in Maintenance and Asset Management Information Systems  by Norman Eason, the founder of the UK Institute of Asset Management. He was one of the earliest to apply computerisation to maintenance for which he won numerous European awards. His research caused him to carefully consider the relationship between information systems and organisational culture, which is the subject of this book.

The above are free.and available as ebooks.   Our first print publication – 

is available on Amazon and other leading booksellers in a print version and there are also epub and kindle versions.  All revenues from this history of the first ten years of our development as a discipline support our current research 

 Full details of our Books, Articles and Other Publications can be found in Resources

Resources.

The Board

The Boring Stuff (Statutory Requirements)