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Asset and Work Management

The register an organization bills from, schedules from and recovers from — and the feeds that decide whether any of those are true.

Also known as EAM, Maximo, Work Order Management, Asset Register, Property Inventory

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 5 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

An asset and work management platform is usually bought by one department as a work order system and ends up as something else: the register a chargeback model bills from, the inventory a continuity plan recovers against, and the dependency a citizen service request falls over with.

Three things decide whether it is any good, and none of them are features.

Where the data comes from. A register maintained by hand is correct on the day it was audited and drifting every day after. The only durable answer is feeds from the operational systems that already know the truth — the telephony system for telephones, the directory for accounts, the access control platform for badges — which is an integration programme rather than a staffing decision. Organizations that staff it instead pay forever for something they could have automated once.

Who it actually serves. Once several lines of business and a couple of outside agencies are on one instance, it is an enterprise platform whatever the purchase order said, and it inherits enterprise questions: who owns the data model, who is on the escalation path, and whether it appears in the security committee’s view of the estate. A system that is not registered as a dependency is invisible on the day it fails.

Where the cost boundary is drawn. Splitting the platform between what the enterprise provides and what a department consumes is the hardest call in any chargeback model, and it is the one that determines whether a department can argue with its own bill. Treating data entry as the department’s own cost and workflow processing as the enterprise service is one defensible answer; the point is that the line has to be drawn deliberately and stated, because it will outlive whoever drew it and still be generating budget conversations a decade later.

Tracking technology — barcodes, decals, passive or active tags — sits underneath all of this and is the least interesting part. The question is never which tag. It is whether coverage can ride infrastructure the organization already owns, and what the register does with the reading once it arrives.

Applied in

  • Enterprise Asset and Work Management Platform2009–2024Fifteen years and two titles on a platform carrying several lines of business and two outside agencies — stood up as a governed project, fed from the systems that knew the truth, and split in the chargeback model.
  • Automated Asset Tracking Program2007–2016Nine years carrying the asset tracking agenda across two titles, argued on billing accuracy rather than loss prevention — and ending in a position and a scoped proof of concept rather than a deployment.

See also

Also searched as

  • CMDB
  • EAM
  • CMMS
  • asset register
  • RFID
  • RTLS
  • real-time location