Fire Horse © J2 | Dreamstime.com
We have two problems in current Asset Management. They both need change!
Talking with AM practitioners around the place, one issue is that implementing AM as a system, as in ISO 55000, is not sticking – even if it got somewhere in the first place.
AM is literally nothing if it doesn’t make a fundamental change in how we decide what to do to our existing physical assets.
ISO 55000 is remarkable for not being worse than it is, but – looking back – AM is not primarily a quality management system at all. It’s a radically different way to look at the future.
I now believe that’s where we need to start, not an end point.
And this means going straight to the top, rocking the boat, even burning metaphorical and perhaps even actual bridges.
The second issue is that we really do need to make decisions in a different way: the criteria for appropriate assets have moved on since the 1980s. We cannot continue with assets as usual, in the face of climate change, changing demands, and environmental constraints.
What’s heartening in this Year of the Fire Horse is that growing numbers of asset managers agree, through their frustrations. If it doesn’t shake things up – it’s not Asset Management.
We declare: The Year of the Fiery Platypus. Time to change the rules.
Thank you to Diarmaid O Culain for the inspiration!
Today, to mark the 10th Anniversary of Talking Infrastructure (and my 85th birthday), we are re-launching the original amqi.com website as Penny’s Place. Permanent links to Penny’s Place can be found in the menu under Resources.
When I closed SAM in 2014 after 20 years, I retained the amqi.com website. For many years, it served only as a signpost to the newer Talking Infrastructure website. But two years ago we started re-creating it, restoring all 400 SAM issues, and as many of the original AMQ issues as we still had access to
In 1984, I began publishing my policy and practice newsletter for Asset Managers to share all that I was learning with others. It started with the Asset Management Quarterly, but within just a few years, it had become the fortnightly Strategic Asset Management. Now, anyone who has published fortnightly will know that searching out and writing on new ideas is completely absorbing. I loved it.
However, with the launch of ISO 55,000, and the recognition and adoption of AM by many engineering associations, both here and overseas, it was time for me to change direction. So, in September 2014, I published the 400th and final issue of Strategic Asset Management. For that issue, I asked many of those who had contributed to its pages over the past twenty years to write where they saw AM going in the future. I called that bumper issue “The Beginning”, because our future is always just beginning, although for me it felt more like an end.
In SAM, you will recognise many of the key names from that period across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Canada. The stories are drawn from the three levels of government, the military and the private sector.
My new direction was to create the Talking Infrastructure Association. This organisation focuses on applying what we have learnt from Asset Management to make decisions that genuinely develop infrastructure ‘fit for people and the future’. Talking Infrastructure opened in 2016, and is going strong a decade later.
Then, in 2023, to ensure we do not lose sight of our origins, I wrote ‘The Story of Asset Management’. This book describes the birth of Asset Management, its struggles and growth over its first ten years, and provides illustrative stories showing how people reacted to the introduction of a new science. This took the story up to 1994, by which time the idea of AM was rapidly spreading. In March 1994, I started the newsletter to support new Asset Managers; in 1996, I created the International AM Competitions to encourage them; and in 1998, I launched amqi.com, a website covering all levels of asset management and free to all.
I aim to add a little more each month. As I re-read the earlier work, I find myself re-invigorated by the energy of that time, and I hope you will feel some of this too.
Please enjoy, Penny.
Morandi Bridge Collapse © Valerio Bianchi | Dreamstime.com
The collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, Italy, in 2018, was a spectacular infrastructure failure. And immediately blamed on lack of maintenance.
43 people died – and now 57 people have been prosecuted for failure to maintain, among other charges.
I was intrigued at the time, because though bridges do collapse, it’s not usually blamed on maintenance. But it is a typical issue for long-life assets, to put off repairs to save money; the point about long-life assets with slow deterioration is that people cross their fingers and hope collapse won’t happen on their watch.
In this case, it appears that nothing was done to address detectable rust in structural steel cables. To see there is rust, and not to act, is if anything even more negligent than not to inspect for rust.
Was it lack of maintenance, or poor design?
I don’t feel much sympathy with the defence argument: those who maintain and operate should surely attempt to understand if there are design issues, and it hardly matters once you can see the rust. (What do you think?)
Charges were laid against engineers, government officials and senior managers. It took almost four years of investigation before the case came to trial, another four years for the trial, and more than 280 hearings. Was it really that technical? I suspect an awful lot of defence buck-passing, and the delay took it beyond their statute of limitations for some of the charges.
This week the former head of the motorway operator was given a 12 year prison sentence, and we can only hope it does encourage the others.
Intriguingly he is already serving a sentence from a separate 2013 road disaster….
© Airam Dato-On – Viewing Vermeer’s Milkmaid
A great book on the importance of maintenance is titled The Innovation Delusion. Asset managers know only too well the ‘dynamic tension’ between building shiny new and keeping our existing systems going.
But a recent book – Peak Human, by Johan Norberg – bangs the drum for innovation in an interesting way. Given one proviso – that we fully acknowledge the horror of human slavery in the past – he suggests we know a golden age when we see one.
“A period with a large number of innovations that revolutionize many fields… in a short period of time.”
Its characteristics, he suggests, are creativity, science, technical achievements, economic growth, better average standard of living. As opposed to stagnation in thought, lack of optimism, lack of tolerance.
The book is a great romp through the usual suspects – Athens, Roman Empire, Renaissance Italy – along with the less familiar, at least to me: Abbasid Caliphate, Song China. The golden age Dutch Republic of trade, non-conformity, great painters, the middle class. The ‘Anglosphere’ from the Industrial Revolution onwards.
Times of curiosity – and a lack of crippling fear of others?
Innovation can’t just mean what the tech-bros say. Revolutionary innovations include doing without kings. With human, women’s and animal rights, and caring for the environment. I am very, very glad we finally understood about germs – and the importance of basic sanitation for everyone.
If innovation Is coming up with better ways of doing things, I am all for it.
But it can’t just be about technology.
- Can we embody a spirit of learning and sharing which isn’t predatory capitalism, instead includes caring for others and sustaining the assets we depend on?
- For feeling in our bones that sustaining is a triumph as much as inventing?
*Happy birthday to my niece Natalie, named in remembrance of the storming of the Bastille this day in 1789
ID 136686433 | Globe © Siarhei Yurchanka | Dreamstime.com
The Institute of Asset Management (IAM) Global Conference June 2026 refreshed me.
It wasn’t just the small but growing community of asset managers who want to discuss (and do) Wave 3 and Wave 4. The conference theme was ‘Connected World – Shaping Our Future’, and several speakers addressed future friendly-infrastructure. Shout out to Miriam MacLennan and Will Adeney for their presentation on regenerative AM, going beyond doing no harm.
It was also refreshingly sophisticated. Not just consultants talking about their projects, unless those projects were instituting Asset Management from scratch at one of the giant airports to be (Jeddah in Saudi Arabia) or managing the M25, nickname The Road to Hell.
Several speakers talked about AI realism – what can it and what can’t it usefully do for AM – and the limits of standards. We cannot afford to be naïve.
There was more discussion off-line about organisations going backwards. One cause is complacency, believing everyone now understands and can do AM, so there’s no need for an AM team. (Let the poachers control themselves?*) On a bad day, I am not sure this is a question of recovery to good Asset Management, so much as proof that some organisations never really understood it in the first place.
There is still work to be done on Wave 2.
But watch out for more on networking around Wave 4!
*From a phrase coined by Jim Kennedy at NSW RailCorp long ago
ID 3723955 | Weaving © Robert Paul Van Beets | Dreamstime.com
I like to think I was searching for Asset Management many years before I heard the term.
This raises a fundamentalist question: what is the deep essence of AM that I sought? Maintenance optimisation, asset data IT, modelling or planning processes: they are all in the mix.
Here’s a link to a Substack-length exploration. Let us know what you think.
Histories of Asset Management: What can we learn from the different strands?
Image by Mollyroselee from Pixabay
Before finding a solution, we first need to find the problem.
In last month’s post, I looked at two problems that we had solved. The first, insufficient housing and supporting infrastructure in the 1950s, was obvious and the solution simple. The second, asset renewal in the mid 1980s, took some finding, and the solution was far from simple, but once we understood what we had to do, we were able to do it. These are not our problems today, but what is? Fortunately, commentators on that last post have given us some clues. What do you think?
@Hein Aucamp observed that
“The first incarnation of AM tended to be asset-centric, renewal-based. Now it has moved to ever-greater levels of strategic consideration, delivering organisational value and services across an increasing set of measures, including sustainability. If AM stops taking into account emerging areas of value, it will definitely become less useful.”
Q1 Hein is right, it will. The question is, how can we know where to start and which new or emerging area to devote time to? What criteria could we use?
@Gregory Baird agreed with Hein that the AMgr’s work is broadening.
“Leaders can feel it: the work is getting more complex. Rates, regulations, climate, workforce, customer expectations — everything is moving, and everything is connected. Asset management can’t stay in its old lane”.
He suggested, “The next evolution is Integrated Infrastructure Stewardship — a holistic approach that blends financial architecture, demand behaviour, risk modelling, digital intelligence, and governance maturity into one continuous decision system. This is more than planning. It’s the operating model for the next generation of resilient cities and utilities. And it’s where the real opportunity lies for leaders who want to build systems that last.”
As exciting as this sounds, in theory, is it possible in practice? The AMgr, even the AM team, is no superman. Forty years ago, the problem was relatively simple. We knew the focus was asset renewal; we knew what we had to do, at least in principle, to get it. The Life Cycle Renewal Model gave us a tool and an approach.
Q2 Where is today’s ‘key question’ and what tools and approaches do we now need? Is the Life Cycle Renewal Model relevant to our new problems/
@Ian Greenwood challenges the idea that we have to be all things to all men. He argues,
“While the more advanced parts of AM have benefited a small group of infrastructure entities where chasing the 4th decimal point of reliability is of value, IMHO, the vast majority would benefit from just getting the basics right and avoiding the distractions of all the shiny bells and whistles.”
Q3 Do you agree? Is the ‘excitement of the new’ luring AMgrs into fields where they are able to contribute very little? And, if so, how do we, as an industry, cope with that?
@Martin Grey avoided the ‘do everything’ approach and focused on just one, ‘managing uncertainty’. He argued that
“Recognising and actively managing uncertainty is essential for making better decisions in the present and shaping more informed decisions in the future. This, of course, depends on having the right management information in place—supported by a continuous improvement capability that identifies emerging trends early, enabling timely intervention before issues escalate into incidents or crises.”
Q4 This got me thinking. I like the one-point focus, but does ‘managing uncertainty’ really depend on having ‘the right management information in place? ‘ If it truly does, we are done for. Not the least because it is probably impossible to tell in advance what the ‘right’ information is. And whatever it is, we probably don’t have it.
But surely it is right to focus on ‘continuous improvement capability’. Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? But in the early days of asset management, that was what we were all doing.
@Philip Tiewater. His comment on the Talking Infrastructure blog is qualitatively different from the earlier comments. Philip says,
“This is a timely topic. In many cases, the infrastructure we have is not as necessary as once thought. Shifting commuting patterns, new regulations, and sea-level rise should drive more conversations about devolution (paved roads to dirt roads), repurposing (vehicle bridges to pedestrian bridges), and removal (replacing traffic signals with roundabouts) rather than life extension. The lowest-cost lifecycle decision is often not to (re)build it in the first place.”
Q5 I like this for it applies basic AM thinking to making ‘fit for the future’ AM decisions, and recognises that this applies not only to new assets but also to the replacement and modification of existing assets. What do you think?
OK. Here we have five suggestions. Where do we go from here?
My sincere thanks to Hein, Gregory, Ian, Martin and Philip.
Red Dragon Memorial to 38th (Welsh) Division at Mametz Wood on the Somme, ID 31564612 © Cyclingscot | Dreamstime.com
The previous Welsh government adopted a new focus for its development policies: the foundational economy.
It’s worth quoting from the mission statement.
“The term ‘foundational economy’ refers to the sectors of the economy that provide the goods and services that underpin everyday life.
The foundational economy is more than just infrastructure, employment and output. It is also citizens’ sense of control and belonging in their community. These sectors are by their nature immediate to people’s surroundings, and so they are vital social as well as physical infrastructure.”
Their strategic sectors included both ‘providential’ infrastructure such as social care and health services and more purely physical infrastructure (water & sewerage, energy, transport) plus construction of residential and commercial buildings, food, and ‘high street retail’.
“The foundational economy approach is centred around the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, which aims to improve the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being of Wales.”
Why Wales has turned away from the glam high-tech vision to quality of life… is partly because of the sheer challenge of turning ex industrial communities into Silicon Valley. The latter is a delusion for most economies anyway.
Why foundational economics bundles social care and physical assets together is because they have much in common economically and morally, starting with the base fact that, well, they are at the base of our way of living.
And even physical infrastructure isn’t just a physical service. As they say, it is also about people sense of being in control and “belonging in their community”.
How would it be if such ‘infrastructure’ wasn’t an afterthought but the very heart of our economics?
(And I hope the incoming Plaid Cymru-led government keeps up the good work!)
See Foundational Economy (1922) by the Manchester-centred Foundational Economy Collective. The Welsh Government document can be downloaded from https://www.gov.wales › foundational-economy
In the debate about public versus private ownership of infrastructure, one thing is clear: we don’t need predators.
In the 1980s, some free market entrepreneurs argued that we should design policy and society to give free rein for what they called predators – themselves, in other words – to predate.
And then their predatory eyes fell on physical infrastructure.
Having already asset-stripped manufacturing companies, they need fresh blood. And this time we were all the prey.
We depended on adequate government regulation, but predatory thinking infested our governments.
We can fog this with talk of efficiency, innovation, managing public debt and use of private capital, but ‘extractive predation’* is much snappier.
*From Foundational Economy (2022)
See also Hettie O’Brien, The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself (2026)
When UK councils were encouraged to develop Asset Management Plans (AMP) in the early 2000s, local government advisors had to warn them off cutting and pasting other councils’ plans.
It is perhaps hard to think of a worse way to plan – to misunderstand what an AMP is all about. Any two councils will have different portfolios of assets, even for similar services. Different types, different ages.
How to plan for asset renewals using shared heuristics with similar organisations might have been a useful conversation.
But even if councils try to write their own plan, they can fail to use them: I love Ashley Bishop’s comment that “often the only thing that comes out an AMP is the dead spider when you open it”.
And so many organisations have struggled with the process – or rather, failing to see that planning is a business process. And a key one, not a one-off document written by someone at a desk, even if they are an Asset Manager who works for the council..
The problem is, this is so fundamental to Asset Management. That asset planning is a way of life embedded into core business as usual.
That not planning is the very problem we are trying to solve.
So, although in general I would support any regulatory requirements to do an AMP, we have to face the real paradigm shift.
How can you take responsibility for vital infrastructure assets, and not look ahead?
How did we get here?
Recent Comments