Human Dimensions in Integrated Asset Management

There have been two major Queensland State Government reforms: the Local Government reform of 2008 and the Water Distribution and Retail reform of 2009. These have increased the size of the community served to 897,000 and the area served to 3135 square kilometres. (These numbers were summed up from the estimated numbers in the fact sheets of the three councils. The corresponding numbers from Allconnex Water are around 850,000 people and 2800 square kilometres). The communities, previously served by four independent and separate councils, will from July 2010 be served by one entity, Allconnex Water, solely for water and waste water infrastructure. Since Allconnex Water only deals with water services, the concept of IAM as used in most other municipalities to integrate systems of other infrastructures (roads, parks, transport etc.) is not valid. In the case of Allconnex Water, however, the integration can apply to the amalgamation of different Asset Management Systems (AMS) and GIS systems used by the parent councils for the water and sewer network. This would exclude all other infrastructure systems, but include billing, meter-data collection, telemetry, SCADA and human resources. The service entities need to make great efforts in advancing IT tools to increase capacity, organisational changes, technical changes, business management, effectiveness and efficiency. While these can be achieved through IAM, the issues relating to human organisational behaviours will be a greater challenge. The most challenging of these is non-comprehensive record keeping, the ability of individuals to adapt from their basic educational and training backgrounds to working on completely automated systems and the general reluctance to accept change. These cannot be accomplished without educating the operations, maintenance and data acquisition staff, their supervisory staff and their managers of the benefits of integrating all systems seamlessly. Adequate funding would also be required to guarantee the success of the system. A one-off training session is totally insufficient; given the ongoing management problems would require continual education with suitable IT support. The full paper will address all these challenges with the dual threat posed by the aging infrastructure and work force, and the herculean efforts required in the implementation and the ongoing management of the IAM.