Asset Investment Planning in the 21st Century
With this inaugural blog, I welcome your interaction with me and other bloggers to develop an instructive forum on how we can improve Asset Investment Planning (AIP) in the 21st century. While my views may be influenced by my long experience in working with power utilities – perhaps the most asset intensive of all industries – I believe that the development of better AIP approaches for this field can be applied to others such as oil/energy, telecommunications, healthcare and mining – and even to federal and state governments.
Among the topics you can expect me to address over the next three months are the following:
• How Electrical Utilities Can Do More With Less
• Gaining Visibility to Avoid Wasteful Budget “Throttling”
• Minimizing Impact of Aging Infrastructures & Workforces
• Top 5 Ways to Improve “Regulatory Relations
While working in the power utility field for more than 15 years, I witnessed many sub-optimal approaches to defining and processing key decision-influencing variables, both quantitative and qualitative, and the difficulties in bringing organizational silos together to better communicate and collaborate. It was difficult then and much more challenging now given the mounting requirements imposed by new environmental regulations and more prescriptive regulatory oversight. Compounding these external challenges are others internally driven by more impatient stakeholders who are more closely tracking how well corporate objectives are being met.
As the old Chinese proverb proposes, “May you live in interesting times.” If not interesting, these times are certainly extremely challenging for asset intensive organizations. Please share your views on where you think AIP is going…or better yet should be going…and any AIP topics you think we should address.
I look forward to our future discourses.
Trevor St. Germain, CTO, Axia Software Corp.