IBM Software Government Thought Leadership White Paper Asset management for local government Achieving unified enterprise asset management with IBM Maximo software
2 Asset management for local government Contents 3 Handling today s complex challenges 4 Unifying a fragmented asset management world 6 Strategic asset management for municipalities 6 Understanding the unique needs of municipalities 7 A comprehensive solution in a converging world 7 Reducing complexity, increasing control 7 Extending the power of asset management 8 For more information 8 About Tivoli software from IBM Executive summary Whether they are called cities, counties, villages, boroughs or something else entirely local government municipalities of all proportion around the world shoulder the same responsibility to provide essential services to their constituents. Amid flat or shrinking budgets, local governments today are expected to accomplish more with fewer resources. Governments aim to maintain and develop the type of community where people desire to live and businesses can thrive, but they often struggle to fulfill those roles while conforming to a complex web of regulations. To meet their responsibilities and achieve their goals, local government organizations must improve their internal operations, achieve economies of scale across their departments and find efficiencies to free resources for other opportunities. The task of improving operations in local government is complicated by the very nature of the organization. Often, there are dozens of departments, each with a specific charter and sometimes an independent budget. The breadth and scope of assets and services for which municipalities are responsible, when coupled with financial pressures, is unlike anything in the private sector. Consider this sample of assets that municipalities manage: Buildings and property: Local governments own and manage a large number of physical structures and places, from city hall to office buildings, parks and recreation land, to perhaps the largest physical space requirement public schools. Roadways: In addition to roads themselves, assets such as road signs, traffic signals and street lights require the appropriate levels of service to ensure they function properly and conform to regulatory standards.
IBM Software 3 Utilities: Local governments may be responsible for some, if not all, of the deployment and maintenance of delivering critical utilities such as electricity, gas, water, sewer, storm water and telecommunications networks. Public safety: Police, fire and other first responders must have well-maintained equipment capable of performing as required in an emergency. Primarily this means cars, trucks and other vehicles, but it can also include specialty equipment. Public transit agencies: Heavy and light rail systems require maintenance of right of way, track, vehicles and stations. Bus systems must maintain buses, but also paratransit vehicles, accessibility equipment and shelters. When individual departments use separate systems to manage their own assets, the result can be a complex, multi-layered enterprise. Local governments need to look at enterprise solutions that allow them to take an enterprise asset management approach to maintain their assets, deliver services and improve performance of the government as a whole. Handling today s complex challenges Three challenges have emerged for local governments with regard to improving their internal operations. First, as government employees reach retirement age, municipalities must make a successful transition to a younger and less experienced workforce while retaining years of accumulated institutional knowledge. Second, local governments must find efficiencies in operations by consolidating applications to support an increasingly converged traditional and intelligent asset environment. Third, as governments promote sustainability practices within their community, they need to develop their own capability to improve building operations through green building practices, smart redevelopment and use of available technology to reduce energy use in existing government buildings. Managing workforce and infrastructure transitions Making the transition from a retirement-age workforce to a younger and less experienced one poses a significant challenge for local governments today, but it also creates an opportunity. As large numbers of highly qualified personnel leave, local governments risk losing practical and institutional knowledge about their assets and operating history. Each department must be able to capture knowledge and asset management best practices from experienced employees and deploy them as proven workflow processes. Not only is the workforce aging the assets underlying operations are also getting older. Minimizing the impact of the aging infrastructure requires local governments to: Provide a central repository containing asset condition and maintenance records. Use historical data to prioritize asset replacement. Program the maintenance of assets based on criticality, usage, history and other factors in order to optimize asset lifespan, minimize risk and comply with regulations.
4 Asset management for local government Consolidating operational applications To effectively manage all of their assets, local governments need a way to harness the data they already have. Then they need a well-defined process to control and manage day-to-day work-related functions. Lastly, they require analytics tools to make informed decisions based on their asset and work data. Accomplishing this requires a rational set of industry standard tools, including enterprise asset management, which can function across the local government enterprise. Governments that seek to do this must: Establish a core set of information systems necessary for the function of government including financial management and geospatial citizen response, as well as asset and work management. Have an integrated asset management solution to manage all types of assets buildings, roads, parks and physical plants that enables optimal return on assets, complies with regulations and helps minimize risk. Link the processes between these systems to support government-wide requirements such as integrated supply chain management. Creating sustainable building operations Local governments must constantly find ways to become smarter through sustainable building operations that are clean, safe and optimized for energy efficiency at a reduced cost over time. Because local governments are bound to environmental health and safety regulations, ensuring that these requirements are met means that any incidents must be tracked, and any resources used to respond to environmental incidents involving hazardous materials and the like must be ready and available. There s also the issue of optimizing the existing building space local governments already have. Making the most of the buildings governments possess by maximizing the use of existing physical space and resources can conserve energy and increase overall operational efficiency. This approach can also help delay costly new construction, further lowering costs and lessen the environmental impact. To help create sustainable building operations and processes, local governments need a way to: Enable a central repository for space management and data center infrastructure to optimize space utilization. Develop processes that can optimize energy consumption. Allow asset-intensive divisions of the government to develop smarter processes that support all types of assets such as emergency rooms, fire doors, buildings or other facilities. Unifying a fragmented asset management world Municipal asset management challenges are further exacerbated by the fragmented nature of most asset management software solutions used today. Individual assets types (school buildings versus park system assets, for example) are generally managed by standalone, legacy systems that are often poorly integrated, expensive to operate and difficult to change.
IBM Software 5 Parks and recreation Roads and bridges Transportation Law enforcement IBM Maximo Asset Management K-12 school districts Water infrastructure Government facilities Public works Fire department Motor pool IBM Maximo Asset Management software delivers a unified platform to track and manage the full spectrum of municipal assets. The islands of data that these systems produce cannot be aggregated in a way that supports informed decisions. Similarly, standalone systems make it next to impossible to comply with recognized industry standards such as the Publicly Available Specification 55 (PAS) from the British Standards Institution (BSI), and the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) Statement Numbers 34 and 42 in the United States. The ideal solution instead provides a unified platform to track and manage the full spectrum of municipal assets and service providers; addresses compliance, accounting and asset-related challenges across multiple departments; and integrates smoothly with key systems such as geographic information systems (GIS), enterprise asset management (EAM), customer information systems (CIS) and ERP. Municipalities that are ready to adopt a new approach can leverage today s superior technologies to unify asset management, optimize asset life, deliver services more efficiently and stretch shrinking budgets. This unified asset management approach embodies a set of processes and practices that enable
6 Asset management for local government municipalities to optimally manage the performance of their critical assets according to the expectations and requirements of key stakeholders. Strategic asset management for municipalities With effective, unified management of assets, local governments are empowered to make more informed decisions about resource allocation and utilization. Unified asset management also improves governments ability to track the results of their decisions over time. Better executive decision making is made possible by improving the quality and timeliness of information. In particular, an asset management approach enables resource allocation decisions to factor in not only the funding required for major projects, but also the utilization of value-added resources including staff, equipment, materials and real estate. The end result is a pragmatic, systematic process for maintaining, upgrading and operating physical assets and managing services in a highly cost-effective manner. Understanding the unique needs of municipalities With a strategic view of all essential assets, municipalities can obtain the right levels of visibility, control and automation to more effectively and more proactively manage assets throughout their life cycles. While the primary capabilities and associated benefits of asset and service management apply to any organization, local governments and municipalities have additional, unique requirements including: Flexibility: Perhaps most important, it is vital that municipal asset management solutions be highly flexible and configurable, in order to support the diverse compliance and accountability requirements of individual municipal departments. It should be possible to configure the application s interface and workflow to better align with each department s specific processes, and to give each decision maker an optimal view on the available data. Scalability: An asset management solution for local governments should also scale to manage the great volume and diversity of municipal assets and service provider relationships. Ideally, the solution would also allow for the management of IT assets including servers, networks, desktop and laptop computers, software and telephony equipment. Functionality: In addition to supporting multiple types of assets, the solution should offer built-in features that local governments and municipalities will find particularly useful. These include workflow and automated alerts that can be associated with procurement decisions or problem escalations; modules for contract management, warranty management, labor certification and service management; built-in depreciation calculations for trucks and repair equipment; and a host of other functions specific to government operations. Integration: It is critically important that the solution can integrate with other key municipal systems in order to leverage current IT investments for maximum value. Integration capabilities that are particularly important for local governments fall into the areas of CIS, EAM, ERP and GIS. Standards-based: Any work and asset management solution should be built on advanced, standards-based architecture that can mesh with evolving initiatives and reduce infrastructure complexity. It should not create another legacy application that requires support and integration.
IBM Software 7 A comprehensive solution in a converging world On today s smarter planet, where everything from utility meters and roadways to nuclear power plants and electric grids is becoming infused with microprocessors, firmware, software, network connectivity and more, assets have unprecedented intelligence. The resulting convergence of smarter assets is bringing substantial changes to the traditional help desk, which until now has always focused on a narrow class of incidents such as water main breaks, power outages or road closures from particular infrastructures. Convergence transforms the traditional help desk into a consolidated help desk capable of providing support for all assets from a single software instance. Reducing complexity, increasing control Achieving asset management success in today s complex world is a major challenge for municipalities. IBM Maximo Asset Management software delivers a complete work and asset management solution for local governments. From a single unified platform, municipalities can monitor and manage their efforts to address regulatory requirements, improve safety and services, maximize asset performance and reduce costs. Maximo Asset Management provides industry-leading asset modeling that is suited for all asset infrastructures be they parks, schools, power lines or road repair equipment to better support the growing need for timely maintenance and repair over asset replacement. Built-in features tailored to local governments such as service level agreements, service desks, mobile capabilities, contract management and standard integration adapters help shorten time-to-value. Maximo Asset Management also enables local governments to manage the increasing number of service providers, whose performance directly impacts asset accountability, and capital and operating budgets. Maximo Asset Management streamlines operations by unifying not only the various processes for asset tracking and asset management, but also the legacy systems used for tracking and management. To further reduce complexity and improve reliability and data integrity, Maximo Asset Management manages all assets from a single, central data repository. Built on a standards-based, service-oriented architecture, the IBM solution supports a centralized implementation across multiple departments and locations, and it integrates with key financial and business systems including ERP and GIS Extending the power of asset management Maximo Asset Management can easily be extended to include procurement and supply chain solutions for asset-related materials, and to provide mobile access to asset data via smart phones and other devices. With IBM Maximo Spatial Asset Management software, users gain visibility to see complex GIS information by providing a dynamic, geospatial context of work, assets and relevant land-based features. This unifying framework brings technology together so that key stakeholders have the information they need.
A proven solution built on decades of experience in enterprise asset management, Maximo Asset Management delivers a comprehensive asset and service management solution that is used by hundreds of municipal customers around the world. Maximo Asset Management helps local governments deliver higher service levels with fewer resources, while providing budget justification and asset accountability. Maximo Asset Management allows local governments and municipalities to see the full range of assets, identify untapped potential within them, and deliver the knowledge and control they need with the accountability legislators and taxpayers demand. The result is a consolidated, trusted platform for easily and effectively managing everything from individual tools at a public works maintenance facility to every building in a public school system. For more information To learn how IBM Maximo Asset Management can help your municipality meet today s unique challenges, contact your IBM representative or visit: ibm.com/tivoli/maximo About Tivoli software from IBM Tivoli software from IBM helps organizations efficiently and effectively manage IT resources, tasks and processes to meet ever-shifting business requirements and deliver flexible and responsive IT service management, while helping to reduce costs. The Tivoli portfolio spans software for security, compliance, storage, performance, availability, configuration, operations and IT lifecycle management, and is backed by world-class IBM services, support and research Copyright IBM Corporation 2011 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America July 2011 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com and Maximo are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol ( or ), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at Copyright and trademark information at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. References in this publication to IBM products and services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. Product data has been reviewed for accuracy as of the date of initial publication. Product data is subject to change without notice. The information provided in this document is distributed as is without any warranty, either express or implied. IBM expressly disclaims any warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or noninfringement. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided. The customer is responsible for ensuring compliance with legal requirements. It is the customer s sole responsibility to obtain advice of competent legal counsel as to the identification and interpretation of any relevant laws and regulatory requirements that may affect the customer s business and any actions the customer may need to take to comply with such laws. IBM does not provide legal advice or represent or warrant that its services or products will ensure that the customer is in compliance with any law or regulation. Please Recycle TIW14094-USEN-00