Fragile Foundations
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, that will be covered next week.?Fragile Foundations was also an impetus for the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) placement of federal real property on its high-risk list in 1997 and it provided a template used later by American Society of Civil Engineer’s famous Infrastructure Report Card that was first published in 1998. ?
Fragile Foundations gained significant attention because it established a direct relationship between investments in public works and public benefits.?It framed that public infrastructure was an “inheritance from the generations of Americans who built before us” and that if not maintained America’s prosperity was at risk.?It recognized benefits from post-World War II investments made in the 1950’s and 1960’s were aging out and that this “cushion of excess capacity” was drawing down.?If this slow, but substantial degradation of physical assets was not addressed, the report warned of negative systematic impacts to the US economy and quality of life.
A synopsis of the strategy Fragile Foundations presented to improve America’s public works was as follows:
As readers will see in upcoming articles, themes in these recommendations will be repeated in over the next three decades to include NASEM’s Strategies to Renew Federal Facilities released this year.?Common themes include need for:
The rationale for Fragile Foundations was after twenty years of lower investments in the 1970's and 1980's compared to post-World War II build-outs during the 1950’s and 1960’s the bill for capital renewal had arrived.? Fragile Foundations was a clarion call for increased capital inflows to maintain public works and continue the economic benefits and quality of life Americans had become accustomed to.
From Fragile Foundations, a new horizon for facility asset management emerged.?The foundational thinking contributions Fragile Foundations made was the level of sustaining investments in public works infrastructure is directly related to benefits or consequences in terms of the US economy and quality of life. It also made clear that the consequences of underinvestment would be direct, obvious, unavoidable, and potentially massive on a national scale.?
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Written by: James J. Dempsey | April 18, 2023
Helpful Links:
NASEM – Strategies to Renew Federal Facilities
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Knowing where we came from is so important to knowing where we are going. Thanks for taking the time to lay all of this out.
Improve facilities repair, renovation, maintenance, and new build outcomes and reduce costs
1 年And.... decades later, not a single Federal Agency or Department has verifiable cost visibility or cost management capability across the organization.
Strategic Asset Manager
1 年Great article and series so far! Check out this for the Australian perspective on the beginnings of asset management: https://talkinginfrastructure.com/2022/04/01/how-asset-management-began/