Photograph by Andréa Farias Farias, Herdi no pedaço., CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83076806
In 2018 Penny Burns and Jeff Roorda suggested we describe our history in revolutions; a month ago, Penny proposed the history of Asset Management is more like Waves.
The First Wave of AM was to establish an asset inventory. We needed to know what we had to manage before we felt we could do anything else.
The Second Wave was to do something useful with this information: Strategic Asset Management, or better decisions to get a better answer in terms of cost, risk and performance. Of course, once we started actually using the data, we became much more aware of data quality and coverage. The need for good information didn’t go away. The best Asset Management practitioners are mostly still in Wave 2 – but already looking beyond it, for example in response to Covid-19.
The coming Third Wave is what Talking Infrastructure is all about. How to use what we have learned – all that data, sure, but more what’s involved in making better asset decisions – and look ‘up and out’ to the questions of what infrastructure our communities really need now, and into the uncertain future?
In March this year, after lockdown began, three of us – Penny Burns, Ruth Wallsgrove, and Lou Cripps of Denver Area transit agency RTD, across three continents – took the framework of the Three Waves and explored what this means to us in practice. Talking Infrastructure is happy here to deliver Part 1 of the recording, the first in an on-going series called Thinking Infrastructure Aloud that we intend not merely as audio downloads but public podcasts.
You get to be the pilot for this, and so: it is even more vital that you comment, and give us feedback on our move into sound!
Thank you for the information! I found the audio was a great touch, a good discussion and feel sometimes I get more out of audio content from actually listening to the voices and message over reading words on a page, more conversational in a way. The idea of waves is useful in my understanding of where to take my organization as we begin our asset management journey and what to focus on, or more importantly what NOT to focus on, as we move forward. Keep up the audio, I like it!