Technology Issues in Asset Lifecycle Management

Effective asset management ties business goals and budgets to the status of your real property assets. The baseline criteria that must be met to develop an accurate, repeatable process that fully addresses asset lifecycle management are easy enough to understand:

• Define Business Requirements: Set processes for asset information, budget requests, and management plans
• Establish Reliable Information: Create, review and refine critical data for regulatory compliance and organizational effectiveness
• Use Quality Data: Assess utilization and condition for all assets.
• Support Key Decisions: Validate repair, improvement, disposal or replacement plans
• Request and Defend Budgets: Justify your requests by tying operational controls to auditable information
• Realign Property Inventory: Make best use of assets to ensure mission fulfillment
• Develop and Use Actionable Plans: Create best practices for consistent and repeatable, accurate performance and reporting

The underlying theme behind these key factors is the need inspect, gather information and conduct analysis to support reliable planning and decision making. The cost of such work can quickly add up to as much as $1.50 per square foot per year.

Some commercially available solutions may simplify the mechanics of collecting data related to asset facilities, operations, condition, utilization and security. Unfortunately, most of these systems rely on proprietary technology, and the work product resulting from the collection effort is often considered the property of the system provider.

To facilitate better asset management – from generating business requirements to implementing a full asset management plan – many Federal Departments have employed a data collection and analysis methodology with the support of outside consultants. These Departments, however, make certain that they get appropriate responses to the following process-oriented questions before committing to a solution provider:

• Is the system or solution technology-independent, or does it rely on proprietary software?
• Does the solution work with legacy applications?
• Is the underlying methodology for asset data collection and evaluation field-tested, or simply mathematically generated?
• Who owns and controls the work production resulting from this data analysis – the end user or the solution provider?

By working with a standardized field-tested methodology for mission-based asset data collection and evaluation, you can reduce the cost of developing accurate decision support information. By avoiding proprietary technology – and by owning and controlling the work products – you can ensure repeatable results.

Repeatable results combined with well-articulated processes make budgeting and management more effective and more reliable. Together, the result is better decisions related to asset lifecycle management.