ASM
The Future of Asset Management
If you know someone of an impressionable age and want to suggest a future-proof career, try asset management. Alternatively, if you want to invest in a company with a future, you could do worse than a company with an interest in asset management software.
In a recent speech to the Australia/New Zealand chapter of the GITA organisation, Geoff Zeiss, Autodesk's director of technology, said the world will spend something like $4 trillion on infrastructure over the next five years. Over a trillion dollars will be spent in the US alone. This is a result of rapid urbanisation in the developing world combined with massive under-investment by the developed world in maintenance and replacement during the last 20 years.
It sounds like a lot of money, but lack of cash is not the real problem. Zeiss pointed out that the workforce of designers and engineers required to build this infrastructure is aging. In 20 years time, the workforce will be significantly reduced unless current trends change.
Moreover, for reasons that are not clear, the productivity of the workforce is falling: it takes more labour now to create a dollar of infrastructure than it did 20 years ago.
There is only one solution to this problem: massive investment in IT to improve the productivity of every aspect of design, construction and maintenance.
The current front runners in the business, Bentley and Autodesk, are both betting heavily on the confluence of CAD and GIS software as the way forward.
However, in a seperate presentation, Arthur Berrill, the vice president of Advanced Concepts and Technology at Pitney Bowes Business Insight in Toronto, said he doubted whether this model would last. He said the interesting technologies to watch would include OGC's CityGML and the extension of the concept of federated databases into the spatial world.
Either way, Zeiss noted that the use of advanced technology would have implications far beyond asset management. He noted, for instance, that over 70 per cent of all the electricity generated is used for the sole purpose of heating or cooling buildings.
This is an extraordinary statistic, if only because it indicates that better design of buildings could do more to reduce the use of fossil fuels than all the alternative energy proposals currently on the drawing board.
