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?
© Platypus Clothing UK
We have set up a wider working group – working title The Way of the AMP – to help collate and disseminate best practice strategic Asset Management.
The intention is to compile a radical handbook, a framework for next level AMP education and training, plus other resources.
Why us, why now?
In the past couple of years the Talking Infrastructure board has discussed what it will take to get back to where Penny started in the 1980s: to the Asset Management Plan as she envisaged it.
Many people adopted the idea of an AMP over the following decades. Quite a few sectors and governments around the world made the AMP a central requirement for funding or price determination, for good reasons.
But it seems to have drifted to a short term justification for a capital renewals programme. We are all for planning renewals – just not so keen on the short termism. The AMP is not a capital projects business case for the next 3-5 years. (That’s the easy bit.)
Penny realised you need to be looking forward at least 15 to 20 years, to be developing your renewals, maintenance and new asset strategies. That’s why she stressed it is strategic AM.
This has to include whole life cost modelling, cost-risk optimisation, driving your information and IT needs from how you want to make your decisions. It requires understanding both risk and demand. And facing the reality that strategic Asset Management is a system, paradigm change, looking at the physical assets in a new way.
Now is the time to make use of all our experiences with the AMP – and help push for better Wave 2 practices.
And we still need to change the world of infrastructure in Wave 3!
Please share your thoughts on what AM practitioners need, what they do, examples and case studies, the tools and techniques we should make more use of .
ID 6497422 © Hans Slegers | Dreamstime.com
Several of us on the Talking Infrastructure Board will never write an AMP again.
That is, we are retired from paid AM work; but then we already have maybe 150 years of experience of Asset Management between us.
Using the Waves concept created by Penny Burns and Jeff Roorda, we propose two roads ahead for Talking Infrastructure.
The first, working title The Way of the AMP, is to collate and disseminate what we know about Wave 2 strategic Asset Management in useful formats, including Penny’s SAM archives. But we want to do more than capture current practice: we want to challenge and stretch AM practice within infrastructure organisations, including better risk, strategy and information management. People who are still pioneers in this space include Jeff Roorda and Todd Shepherd.
For this we are bringing in more and younger people still developing in their AM careers around the globe to add and challenge.
The second is to go beyond Wave 2, to ask better questions about infrastructure decision-making in our societies. Here, some current AM thinking may be part of the problem, not the solution to the challenges we face in the 2020s.
What are the infrastructure-related issues now? How have they changed since Penny created AM in the 1980s, to deal with problems inherited from the 1950s post World War II?
What does it mean to be a future friendly infrastructure planner in 2026?
Your input, please.
© 2026 NASA, from April 7
Well, the world did not end last night.
But something has become clear. Targeting weapons at infrastructure such as bridges and power networks is a war crime.
From some of the most miserable moments of the last 130 years emerged the idea that some things are always wrong, whoever does them – even before there was anything like clear international law against them. This lead directly to the Geneva conventions and human rights courts.
Destroying critical infrastructure, starting with water and sewerage, roads and power, is an attack on non-combatants. It undermines civilisation, as in digging a big hole under society that may not be repairable.
As infrastructure asset management practitioners, we are involved in life-changing decisions whether we realise it or not.
If it is always wrong to target the infrastructure people depend on to live, it’s also vital to commit to maintaining what is needed. To ensuring we have the skills and tools and democratic processes for infrastructure.
Time for an Infrastructure Code of Ethics?
© Channel 4 2026
People in general generally don’t want to have to think about infrastructure.
Being forced to think about it because it’s not working is a sign of systematic failure.
Trouble has been brewing in the privatised English waste water sector for many years, and it has now spilled over into a three part Channel 4 docudrama, Dirty Business. Its heroes are Windrush Against Sewage Pollution and Surfers Against Sewage; the villains including everyone in charge at the Environment Agency.
I would say that in England the privatisation of water and waste water in 1989 made everyone angry mostly because it made them think about it. Things like boil orders and droughts suddenly became unacceptable, and not simply because someone was now profiting by them. Water company CEOs became the archetypal fat cats, though they weren’t paid more than other company bosses.
Water and sewerage are just too close to the bone; we want them to work safely and reliably out of sight. We didn’t actually ask for them to be competitive.
The deal was that there would be vigilant government regulation on all fronts. Control over drinking water quality, effluent discharge, leakage and charges.
But waste water and environmental protection got relabelled bureaucracy, and someone in our last crazy Conservative government decided waste water operatives could ‘self-regulate’. They could tell the government when they broke the law with illegal sewage releases into the rivers and sea. After all, why would they lie?
Yeah, right.
That and asset stripping/ borrowing against the assets to pay out to shareholders, including to the Vampire Kangaroos.*
It turns out they quickly found it was cheaper to pay the fines than invest in fixing the assets anyway. The argument that we needed private capital to invest to solve the mess, well, that just doesn’t seem to work in England.
The companies involved have now asked for fifteen years’ grace (no fines) to not fix them again.
Not sure this is a sustainable economic model for infrastructure?
Note: England here mean England, not Scotland or Northern Ireland. The majority of the private companies are responsible for both water and waste water.
*No prizes for any Australian who guesses who they are!
145550420 © Planetfelicity | Dreamstime.com
If you were sitting down from scratch to write down what you wish you’d known when you got into all this AM stuff…
Would you wish that you had known more (pick one)
- Engineering
- IT
- Finance
- Economics
- Psychology
- Statistics
- Self-knowledge
- Philosophy
- Politics
What would you have studied at 18?
Asking what we should know is, of course, a question of what it is we do.
I am sure that, in addition to more and better about specific AM concepts and tools, I could have used more on managing managers, and infrastructure economics. And I wished I’d loved statistics!
(But I would have liked to do palaeontology at 18.) (I am not going to claim it would have made me more useful!)
174608439 | Milton Keynes © Mr Paul Hanley | Dreamstime.com
I live in an old town, Newport Pagnell, best know for two road transport icons: the second motorway service station in Britain, and Aston Martin.
Newport is also part of the first new city in England, Milton Keynes. MK is famous for its roundabouts, over 130 at last count.
Roundabouts are fascinating infrastructure. They take up more room than traffic lights but they are much more efficient.
They raise questions about what good infrastructure looks like. Someone had the technical idea for them well before MK, but they also require changes in people’s behaviour. They are hard to retrofit.
What is the role of technical innovation in infrastructure? What are all the other things that have to go with the introduction of a technical innovation? What changes have to be forced on people for the technology to work?
I have driven around a Dutch roundabout while they still ran with priority from cars entering, not the vehicles already on it. Totally biased, this seemed like a very bad idea to me.
I have driven on a brand new roundabout in a central Washington town that was also scary, because I knew many drivers wouldn’t understand how they work: they take getting used to, with plenty of warning signs about priority.
I’ve sat at US four way stops and admired the discipline – British drivers really struggle with them – but, as I waited, also calculated that a roundabout would be faster.
I drive on Roundabout City’s roads, where inhabitants know they do not have stop, and everyone knows how to judge gaps. Out of towners run the risk of being rear-ended.
Curiously, small roundabouts on housing estates slow the traffic down. But the main, grid roads with large roundabouts at every main junction can be driven at 60 miles per hour. And you can drive straight through this city of a third of a million people and never see a single house.
Milton Keynes people love their roundabouts – but have to be warned about how traffic light systems work.
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