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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
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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?
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 .
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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!
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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!)
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