Infrastructure Asset Management in a Municipality
Based on the foundation blocks a five-pronged strategy is proposed, based on a common theme
of sharing both data and services, within and external to Auckland City Council:
- Sharing or pooling of local government services.
- Data sharing with other public and possibly private agencies.
- Development of an efficient and effective regulatory system.
- Data sharing within ACC.
- Comprehensive, coordinated service delivery.
Each of these five business strategies has a corresponding set of IT strategy streams associated
with it. Collectively these streams form the framework for the organisation-wide ITSP as
represented in Fig1.
The strategy streams are further broken into components, which identify existing and future
initiatives for the application of information technology. The 2002 version of the ITSP
prioritised four activities that leveraged off the investment in information systems and
information. Key here, is that leveraging off previous investment for further gains has been
possible because of previous strategic visioning and planning – both in the business and
technology infrastructure. Two of the four priorities related to the evolution of the spatial
systems environment which includes the management of city infrastructure assets – pipes, parks
and roads.
A key learning in developing the ITSP was that all business units of the organisation will
not necessarily have developed business strategic planning to a point that the ITSP could
work with. In response to such information gaps, the ITSP needs to contain a provocative
element. Auckland City achieved this within it’s ITSP by challenging the businesses to
consider new technology opportunities by assigning a probability to them occurring (from
an I.T. view). The challenge then lay with the business to partner with I.T. to recognise or
modify the planned outcomes.
Infrastructure Strategic Planning
Using the Information Technology Strategic Plan as input, it becomes possible to design with
confidence a strategic information technology infrastructure. As key business strategies and
functions of the organisation are agreed, the technology to deliver to these functions can be
visioned and planned strategically.
Auckland City has a strong organisation goal of working as and being seen as “one
organisation”. A key enabler to this achieving this goal has been the recognition of the
importance of sharing information. The technology infrastructure has been designed to provide
enterprise systems and information repositories, discouraging the development of other wise
standalone “feral” applications.
The resulting corporate I.T. infrastructure can be illustrated quite simply in Fig 2 below
Strategic selection of systems and partners to manage the majority of council’s information sets
and to support business processes has allowed us to restrict the number of corporate system
applications to four. While there do exist other specific “line of business” systems e.g. library
catalogues, zoo animal management and art gallery collections, the four cornerstone systems
above deliver to the enterprise requirements. While these systems do interface directly with one
another (ODBC, COM), there also exists a layer across them all that is a suite of capability that
can access all sets to deliver to numerous other business process requirements e.g. business
intelligence which is based on source data retrieved from the 4 cornerstone systems. These
systems became core to the development of enhanced asset management practices in Auckland
City.
Asset Management
Asset Management Background
In the late part of the 1990’s New Zealand's Central Government enacted legislation that required
local government (i.e. local Council’s) to develop and regularly update accurate long term
financial plans. A large portion of a local Council’s expenditure and associated funding is related
to infrastructural assets (pipes, roads, park features, water and wastewater treatment plants etc).
At the time of this law change there was not within Auckland City Council standard asset
management processes or centralised systems capable of efficiently producing the now required
linked asset and financial plans.
To develop the required systems capabilities senior managers recommended to the Directors
Group an integrated programme of activities be initiated. This programme was underpinned by
two core projects
- Asset Management Information System (AMIS)
- Financial Management Information System (FMIS) SAP software
This paper focuses on the AMIS project.
Project AMIS
Why Invest in AMIS
The AMIS process allows for accurate information about assets to be collected, stored,
maintained and used in calculating their value and useful life. When these asset matters are well
understood increased confidence can be attributed to long term financial plans. Asset managers
will be able to plan the timing of projects for asset renewal or enhanced service more precisely.
The amount of depreciation funding needed to renew the assets will be regularly collected at the
right level to ensure there is “money in the bank” to undertake works when needed.
What Does the AMIS Allow
AMIS is a database and set of software applications to manage information about infrastructure
assets. The applications are custom developments to the Smallworld Geographic Information
System (GIS). The City was just completing the staged introduction of Smallworld GIS at the
time conceptual planning for AMIS commenced.
AMIS lets asset managers view the information about particular city owned assets they are
interested in against the geographic (map) view of the city held in GIS. Using the core property
boundary or cadastral base GIS layers such as aerial photographs, contours, zoning information
etc can be selectively added to the display screen.
