All Australian states have legislation that mandates that Councils perform various asset management related tasks, so in Australia all Councils are putting at least some effort into asset management.
But legislation aside, why? How does asset management help Councils, and which components of asset management help the most?
It is pretty obvious that no Councils have sufficient financial or physical resources to maintain all of their assets in pristine condition, so logically Councils must have a mechanism they use to decide how they spend their money on their assets. It maybe totally undocumented, inconsistent & adhoc, it may be gut feeling, whim, or an advanced Capital Works Evaluation Framework, but it must exist.
Asset Management is about finding the most cost effective way of managing assets. The current orthodoxy is that a complex condition & service level based mechanism is better than an adhoc subjective mechanism, and it probably is, but where's the proof? If you have any persuasive arguments about the benefits of condition & service level based asset management please list them below.
Asset management cannot be based on
- Age being the sole criterion for determining whether an asset is no longer servicable, because there are numerous instances where assets that could have been considered to have reached their theoretical servicable life are still in very good working order. This may be due to factors such as manufacturing practices or design that produced a better quality product than may have been the norm. The converse can be true too, where an asset does not even approach its theoretical service life and must be replaced much earlier than predicted.