Fragile Foundations

AM Foundational Thinking Miniseries - Reloaded

The last article introduced the Foundational Thinking miniseries. It explained how ISO 55000 standards represent a major milestone in asset management foundational thinking. This next installment begins a chronology of how facility asset management evolved in the US Government sector. This evolution goes from what National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) most recent report, Strategies to Renew Federal Facilities, called “classical facility management thinking” to a new frontier in “asset management system thinking”.

This chronology begins with a National Council on Public Works Improvement report published in 1988 titled: Fragile Foundations – A Report on America’s Public Works. By many measures this report was a starting point for modern facility asset management practiced in the US Federal Government today. The report was a catalyst that got NASEM’s series of facility asset management reports rolling, the first of which, Committing to the Cost of Ownership, …