© Cammeraydave | Dreamstime.com
ISO 55000 defines asset management as the coordinated activity of an organization to realize value from assets.
I like the word co-ordinated, but I was never so sure about ‘value’.
That AM should be driven by the organizational objectives and targets was defined well before ISO 55000. Physical assets are managed in order to support a company doing what it aims to do, not for their own sake.
If the aims are evil, it follows the asset management isn’t going to be for the angels either.
Not long before it collapsed, I interviewed two Enron asset managers in London. They told me their main job was to know who to bribe and how far you could go before you were thrown in jail. (I suspect they knew the end was near.)
In practice, for many of us, the bigger problem we face is not evil targets, but missing or stupid ones. Organisations don’t know what it is they want their organisation to deliver, other than not making a loss or a scandal. For infrastructure, it surely has to be a service for customers & the community; but how to set meaningful key performance targets for service is often hard work.
Transit has struggled with this forever, but even power generation gets muddled. In markets with shifting prices, what is the amount of electricity we want to produce at any specific time? Apart from anything else, the answer has to involve costs, like spot cost per megawatt, and plenty of power organisations don’t know that. (I’d say rail generally doesn’t have a clue of their cost per passenger mile.)
We default to targets like minimising unplanned outages, because that’s relatively simple. Or even more asset-specific measures like pavement condition index. (Aaargh!)
I am convinced the person who came up with the ISO 55000 definition felt clever – clever to avoid saying ‘lowest cost’ or ‘least risk’. Value is whatever an organisation thinks it is. (And we won’t define ‘asset’ very clearly, either.)
It’s out of scope to discuss where the value comes from or how to capture it in SMART targets.
Quite apart from the evil ones, and our own ethics as asset managers, I believe we have a real challenge with stupid or missing targets. In practice, we cannot just aim to be aligned, if there is nothing that makes sense to align with.
Smart asset managers get drawn into the question of organisational KPIs. I know I was. I think setting meaningful infrastructure targets is closely allied to good AM thinking.
And as for all that missing cost analysis….
Anyone fancy attempting a better definition?
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)
© 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!)
Excavation at Star Carr in Yorkshire, bbc.com
If I had the brain capacity, I’d write a book called something grandiose like Infrastructure and Civilisation. To bring out just how important working infrastructure is to us.
You can’t have ‘civilisation’ – people living in towns and cities – without it. How did it grow, from the earliest actions to build shared causeways? We are handy, but it must be more than that.
I just read an interesting book called Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World. It’s by Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist who also conducts psychology experiments on small children and co-compiled a database of hundreds of cultures already studied by anthropologists and archaeologists to analyse for key factors – as I said, interesting.
It made me reflect that both modern society and physical infrastructure require two things: co-operation between people (to build and maintain far larger social and physical structures than one person or even family could do) and sanctions, in other words ways to get people to do, or not do, things.*
Both have their origins well before homo sapiens, of course. Primates are largely social co-operators – and have strong views of what’s not fair, that they will go out of their way to punish. Sanctions for anyone not behaving well don’t have to involve written laws or dedicated police: for a social animal whose life depends on co-operation, disapproval works well on its own.
I grew up with a just-so story about competition being the motive force of progress, but it is much, much more interesting to look at how people work together.
It’s certainly my experience of infrastructure. 99% co-operation with some rules and regulation to force social-mindedness where necessary.
(And my current read is Progress, A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea!)
What’s the required balance of co-operation and rules for sustainable infrastructure?
*Whitehouse talks about why slavery did not in the end work out – why it’s more effective to get people to co-operate, when you grasp our basic psychology.
The Board of Talking Infrastructure wants to thank Penny – wants to make a big, big fuss over Penny – for the immensity of what she means to us and to Asset Management.
All of us had our lives and careers changed by Penny. Without her, we wouldn’t be calling ourselves asset managers, for a start. We are doubly blessed that she is also a great friend to each of us individually.
I first knew of Penny when another important AM person in my life, David Ford, came back from a trip to Australia and New Zealand in 2001 clutching a copy both of the International Infrastructure Management Manual and an issue of Penny’s Strategic Asset Management newlsetter. Saying there were some things we therefore would not have to make ourselves, and anyway could never have done so well.
I already was sure when I met Penny in person in 2004 at ICOMS we would be fast friends, going to stay with her and Bob in Adelaide on the MESA ‘eminent speaker’ tour that summer. My life certainly was never the same after that, as the next year I went back to work with her on a job for NSW Rail Corps… and the year after to live in Sydney. Where she and I could plot some more, ending up eventually with Talking Infrastructure itself.
Of course, the price I paid for her continuous inspiration was knowing I would always been running to catch up – sometimes several large steps behind her thinking. But that was always so much fun.
One thing I am most proud of is spreading her words around North America, making sure new assets managers knew who she was and her vision for infrastructure Asset Management. She has quite a fan club of younger women around the globe, including the USA. I would like to claim I am fan #1, but there are many pioneers in the queue ahead of me.
Talking Infrastructure would like to publish your memories and appeciation of Penny. When did you first come across her? Where did you take the ideas she inspired?
From script by Lou Cripps
Bad news for techies, but infrastructure is mostly money, business and politics.
Yes, Asset Management is about making better decisions on our physical assets. But not just any decisions: the wider, longer-term, strategy and co-ordination that organisations struggle with.
Operations already take care of immediate responses. Engineers are more than happy to focus on the technical details. Finance counts the money – but struggles to do more because it doesn’t get the honest information about the assets that it needs.
The gap that Penny Burns identified in 1984 was, first of all, planning for capital renewals to maintain the infrastructure base we already have, beyond the next year. A need most people didn’t even notice, let alone take on to fill.
In the forty years since, Penny has talked extensively about decisions for new infrastructure as well. About how the overall system needs to change to meet changing demands for service. And the impact of physical assets on the economy, the environment, our communities.
In other words, Strategic Asset Management.
In the past few years I have been asked to develop webinars and other support for better asset strategy and planning. My fundamental message is A. Strategy and planning are not the same, and B. they are complementary, and we need them both.
Over the next few weeks, we’d like to explore them both further. Starting with understanding why organisations are so bad at them.
- Asset Management planning is about the allocation of budget and resources. It therefore has plenty of opponents who only care that their own projects and assets get the money.
- Asset Management strategy requires standing back to think strategically, which many people (including CEOs) are not good at doing.
- There isn’t a formula, or a template. There are good questions, but some of them are hard, and many of them require saying no to some things, and some people. Not going along with the political clamour for simplistic solutions.
- There are vested interests – some of it bordering on corruption (who will make money from this decision?) And more who feel challenged on how they have done things in the past. Even on what they were trained to do.
What are your experiences of asset planning? What works – and what gets in the way?
Is any of it really a technical problem we can solve at our desks?
Last known photo of St Francis Dam before it collapsed, © scvhistory.com
You know when you hear something you never noticed before, and then hear about it again the very next day? (It’s known as the Mandela Effect.)
I mean, I saw Chinatown many years ago and so understood that there was a rotten heart to Los Angeles’ water supply, but I never thought about where the water comes from – or understood how it trashed a valley and its communities in the 1920s.
Originally called Payahǖǖnadǖ, meaning ‘place of flowing water’, Owens Valley is a now dry valley north of LA.
I work with enough hydro dams to be curious about dam failures – there have been a few catastrophic failures in the 20th century – so wanted to watch a PBS documentary about the total failure of St Francis Dam in the valley. It failed because of hubris. It did not make it past its first day in operation. But the documentary was about much more than the immediate collapse and the hundreds of people who died that day.
Los Angeles basically stole the water, buying up water rights surreptitiously and sometimes illegally. For some reason I can’t comprehend, it even memorialises the engineer responsible for the dam failure (and the overall aqueduct, which does still exist): Mulholland, of the Drive.
And the day after I watched the documentary, I read a review of a book titled Dust, by Jay Owens, using the Owens Valley as a 20th century example of humanity creating arid dust bowls where there were once thriving ecologies.
Metropolitan LA is a funny old place. I have spent plenty of time there as my brother moved to Azusa in the late 1970s, and retired to Orange County to the south. It was hailed as the city of the future once, but water is the big question mark, still. You would have to conclude that the LA basin is well beyond its carrying capacity, and perhaps always was.
Owens Valley, and St Francis Dam, seem suitable reminders of the challenge of sustainability. enshrined in the original BSI PAS 55 definition of Asset Management. The valley and its people – original and immigrant – paid the price for the development of a vast city region.
Not the first and surely not the last example, but a sobering reminder that water engineering is both hard, and not always on the side of the angels.
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