Without a focal point, organizations struggle to do more than isolated improvements, and generally lack a framework or structure to bring together the different activities around assets.

What most will fail to achieve, without at least a small dedicated team, includes:

• Asset strategy development
• Integrated long term asset planning: someone has to do the co-ordination, develop the processes, and build the relationships across functions to bring them together
• Anything beyond compliance to a check the box standard, and value that exceeds the burden of compliance efforts
• ISO 55000 or other standard Certification – someone has to manage this program of action
• Asset risk management beyond safety, general corporate risks, or a high level risk register
• Ownership of the Asset Management system and AM objectives

It also looks fairly impossible to implement good Asset Management with no-one who knows much about it. Rule of thumb: you need at least two people who have been on an Asset Management course to begin.

We might go further and suggest that if there is no-one who is prepared to identify as an Asset Management professional, dedicated to getting themselves and their colleagues developed in Asset Management skills, a company doesn’t really know what to do or how to go about it.

It is easy in this area to be unconsciously incompetent – not even to know what you don’t know.

We probably wouldn’t even consider doing this in other areas: trying to take on a whole new approach to our business using a radically new discipline in an amateur and haphazard way without dedicated resources. It may reflect that many people don’t really know what is involved, and why it is different to what we have done before. And hard to do without committed effort, because it does require real shifts in processes, emphasis and attitudes.

Anytime everyone is meant to be responsible for something, it also means probably no one is.