Public Infrastructure is ready to Tweet, are we ready to listen?

This post was inspired by a recent article in Fast Company Magazine,"Made to Stick: The Telltale Brown M&M
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/143/made-to-stick-the-telltale-brown-mampm.html

77,000 US bridges are labeled structurally deficient, many are 40-50 years old, nearing the end of there life. It is estimated by the EPA that 40% of the nations water infrastructure is 40+ years old (10% is over 80!), some city water authorities, like San Franciso estimate that 50% of water is lost through leaky pipes before reaching the customer.

In order to address these issues, we need a more productive way to monitor the status of public infrastructure in order to create a prioritized and actionable process to maintain assets. There has been so much emphasis of late to make our Electric Utility grids "smart", this is a great start, but the rest of our world's infrastructure wants to talk to us too!

We have the capability today to add monitoring devices or monitoring processes to our infrastructure to allow it to "tweet" its status. If 4.2 million of us are willing to follow Britney Spears, how difficult can it be to have an Enterprise Asset Management system to listen to the assets it is managing every day? Well, it can be daunting! Monitoring devices can "tweet" constantly, and we really don't want to listen to our assets all the time. They key is to filter out the irrelevant data and create correlations that lead to such critical tweets like:

"Hello, I am a critical part of bridge XYZ, carrying 100,000 vehicles every day, I have corroded to the point that I need to be fixed, if you wait much longer, I will fail, costing you $100M and the potential loss of life."

"Hey Maintenance Manager, please not that my connection point at the corner of Main Street & Oak Street has weakened, you may want to check me out in the near future. Did you know that I am the main connection providing water services for 10,000 homes?"

With good Maintenance Management business processes and and Enterprise Asset Management system that can listen and correlate what its infrastructure is tweeting, the benefits can be tremendous. This moves organziations to proactive and preventative maintenance which can lead to lower the total cost of ownership and increase the asset life of public infrastructure.

So, when public infrastructure tweets you in the future, will you listen?

Experience Asset Intensity: www.mincom.com