An Asset Management friend recently emailed me that her CEO had challenged her view of the importance of AM to their whole business strategy.  “So asset management is improving our passenger experience? Asset management is improving employee engagement?  Asset management cures cancer?” 

While, on the other hand, even plenty of people with ‘Asset Manager’ in their job title act like their job is to manage the list of assets in an IT system.

ISO 55000 makes bold claims, that I think it cannot substantiate. That the same principles we apply to managing physical assets hold true to managing anything else of value, like financial assets, or people. I suspect that the good folks who wrote ISO 55000 may have no idea what that even means – or, put it this way, would you necessarily go to an engineer to tell you how to manage people?

So I do in practice think there’s a limit.

However, managing physical assets clearly is a huge part of running an asset-intensive organisation such as transit or power, or even a city. It’s certainly most of their budget and resources. If you can get that right, many good things should follow, like profit, customer service and, yes, engaged workforce.

But perhaps the real point is that to manage the physical assets well, you have to think about profit, customer service, and engaged workers.

To me, it’s obvious that it matters – it matters hugely that we do manage our essential infrastructure well, that not merely our economy but quality of life and planetary health depend on it. So we need a wider vision, an understanding of interconnections and dependencies, ‘the bigger picture’.

Asset management will not cure cancer. It has boundaries.

But managing the physical assets that underpin our society effectively is probably wide enough scope to be getting on with, don’t you think?