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.
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