LiDAR News : The Future of Asset Management Innovation in the US

In his final editorial of 2014, Gene Roe, the Managing Editor and Co-Founder of LiDAR News prognosticated on the future of infrastructure management in the US. In the area of "the ROI of planning, designing, building and managing in 3D" owners and construction firms that execute very large project in the private sector invest in these technologies.  In the public sector, however, state Departments of Transportation (DOT) with their legacy technologies and financial constraints have not adopted new strategies or technologies. The federal government has offered incentives for change with the Federal Highway Administration "Every Day Counts" initiative, as one example. This program incents DOTs to "think about widespread adoption of 3D and lifecycle asset management" (p. 6).

Elaborating on the established culture and technology that inhibit innovation and current strategies within state agencies, Roe first addressed the need for organizational change, He stated,
"what we are not addressing is how to reengineer the business processes from the top down to allow the innovations to become standard operating procedure while providing the improvements in productivity that would be welcome" (p. 6). He then offered the challenge to the community to develop a "well articulated 21st century vision. . . a roadmap for large organizations with geospatially distributed assets that describes what the future is going to look like and how they are going to get there from here" (p. 6). Roe embeds in this challenge a call to the technology sector to develop a comprehensive software and technology model "that would support the management of the entire lifecycle of geographically dispersed assets" (p. 6). He concluded that this model would "require, at a minimum support for planning, design, scheduling, estimating, construction monitoring, operations and maintenance all integrated with the financial accounting and business systems" (p. 6).

In a future post, I will report on the efforts of some organizations and agencies in the Rocky Mountain region to implement change and their plans to move forward.

Roe, G. (2014). LiDAR News, vol. 4, 8. page 6.