September 8, 2025

From purpose and people to digital and data, IAM CEO Ursula Bryan talks to WSP’s Tom Goodyer about the future of the discipline and how it can keep making a difference to communities around the world. 


As Chief Executive Officer of the Institute of Asset Management (IAM), Ursula Bryan heads an organisation with a presence in over 70 countries. A past president of the IAM, she has been on the professional body’s board since 2009. Ursula has three decades of experience in asset management and previously held asset management leadership positions at National Grid.

Tom Goodyer is the global lead for Asset Management at WSP and is based in the UK. He has led asset management programmes in the UK, US, Europe and Middle East. He also chairs the ISO committee writing standards for asset management, including ISO 55001
UK Transport and Infrastructure
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Tackling society’s pressing problems

Asset management might appear to be a pragmatic practice, simply looking after infrastructure.  How does it address future needs of society?

Ursula

If you look back thirty years to when asset management was beginning to be recognised as a discipline, the focus was on cost, risk and performance. These are still very important, but asset management is changing. It’s increasingly becoming a force for solving challenges such as resilience and social inclusion and for making the most of opportunities such as digital transformation.

Tom

The people entering the profession today are passionate about social justice, climate responsibility and resilience. It’s an exciting time to be in asset management: there’s a real opportunity for long-term thinking about the value of assets. People care more than ever about how assets are managed to result in day-to-day decision-making that makes the world a better place.

Making infrastructure more inclusive

How is the desire to make the world a better place reflected in the day-to-day practice of asset management?

Ursula

Whether you call it social infrastructure, inclusive infrastructure or something else, more and more emphasis is on supporting communities that are disadvantaged by a lack of access to services such as transport. That extends not just to initial development, but also to asset management. It’s an area in which we can learn a lot from First Nations communities, who are experts at managing their assets – particularly their natural assets.

Tom

I’ve seen this really embraced in New Zealand, where the asset management professional's association Āpōpō has gone to great lengths to understand and embrace the Māori cultural context and world view. This includes using Māori language to describe asset management approaches and creating a comprehensive guide containing best practices, expert insights, and Māori principles.

Bringing Māori knowledge to asset management in New Zealand

Read the article by WSP’s Gary Porteous and Adele Jones in the October 2025 edition of the IAM’s Assets magazine.
Read more

Uniting people and purpose to help communities

What must organisations do to ensure they involve, and are accountable to, the communities they serve?

Ursula

As an integrative discipline, asset management brings people together to create better outcomes for communities. And that’s driving a move beyond stakeholder engagement, to co-creating solutions. Communities are becoming fundamentally engaged in how investment can best serve them to deliver better outcomes.


Tom

To be accountable to their communities, organisations must live by the values they’ve set out. For example, many public sector organisations have declared climate emergencies. If you’ve done that, then climate resilience and adaptation must be some of the criteria you use when you’re deciding how to invest money for the future. It helps demonstrate accountability to your community stakeholders.

Enhancing decision-making

So much of asset management is about making better decisions – for communities, for the future, for infrastructure owners. What can you do to enhance decision-making?
Ursula

Co-creating with local communities is one way we can improve decision-making, which is a massively important part of the asset management discipline. Tom and his colleagues are busy working on a new guidance document that will be part of the ISO 55000 suite and will focus on decision-making. And at the IAM, we’ve selected this as the theme for this year and for our global conference. There are some real challenges, such as how you define and measure different types of value. But there are also opportunities, including how digital transformation could help support smarter decisions.


Tom 

When it comes to making the most of digital information for asset management, leadership will be as important as technology. There’s a lot of focus on building information modelling (BIM) but managing the asset long-term only really requires a summary level of information from the design and construction process. What’s important is having the right information. Whether a project is big or small, it’s easy to talk to stakeholders and figure out what you need to know. But it takes leadership to initiate that before procuring the design, and to plan how that data will be looked after decades into the future – beyond the careers of the people involved in design and construction, and beyond the life of the software used to create it.

Recognising the value of data and people

There’s a lot of discussion about the use of data in asset management. Just how important is data and the people who work with it?

Ursula

Organisations are beginning to think of data as an asset, which provides discipline and enables the sort of thinking that is applied to physical assets – including the costs and benefits of collecting and maintaining that data. We’re also starting to see organisations put data on their balance sheets, and the UN has recently issued guidance on this. This shifts the thinking away from data is a cost to what value can be derived from data.


Tom

Data can be extremely valuable, but it needs to be kept up to date. For the foreseeable future, that will require some human intervention. It needs a standardised approach too. While the value of BIM for designers is clear, I think people’s appetite to do exciting work ran ahead of industry agreement on things like standardising data structures. Similarly with AI. I see a lot of AI use cases, and its ability to analyse messy data is brilliant. But for me the big opportunity is the underlying data. How can we use the analysis to feed back to an organisation’s leaders, show them how the messy data affects decision-making and put steps in place to improve that data?


Ursula

The industry needs to ensure it has people who can tackle questions like these, people with different skills, capabilities and competencies. In the future we will need people who can make use of AI just as much as we need people who can engage with stakeholders to co-create solutions that meet their needs.

Advocating for asset management

The importance of asset management is sometimes overshadowed by the excitement of new development. How can the discipline get the attention it deserves?

Tom

It’s human nature to get excited over new tools like AI, just as it is to get excited over big new capital investments. Building something new is often considered more appealing, particularly politically, than looking after what we’ve already built. I believe we can change that; we can generate excitement around asset management and all the benefits it brings.


Ursula

The UN has calculated that one dollar spent on existing infrastructure provides the same value as spending one-and-a-half dollars on building something new. So existing assets can gives you a much better return on your investment. It’s also more sustainable, because by looking after existing assets for the long term they continue to deliver a service and we maximise the natural and manufactured resources that were invested in those assets. The UN’s handbook on infrastructure asset management, Managing Infrastructure Assets for Sustainable Development, advocates developing asset management plans for local and national governments. It’s aimed at developing regions but has enjoyed wider uptake as more and more countries realise the value of asset management.


Tom

It’s vital that asset management is considered from the outset. As a nation, you don’t want a situation where you build assets you can’t afford to maintain – where you have an infrastructure gap or technical debt, as it’s sometimes called – because it’s a terrible waste. When the US enacted its MAP-21 Bill to invest in repairing and modernising the nation’s infrastructure it required agencies to undertake asset management practices to ensure money was being directed to where long-term investment was needed. It’s a great example of asset management being used in public policy to deliver the right outcomes.

Celebrating the volunteers who make it possible

Professional institutions are organisations with relatively few paid employees. How can they promote and advance asset management globally?

Tom

The sort of top-down direction from government that makes change happen is due to public discourse affecting public policy. This is why we need volunteers supporting those industry bodies - professional institutions like the IAM, and standardisation NGOs like ISO to help influence high-level thinking on asset management. 


Ursula

And those professional institutions rely on hundreds of volunteers. We have seen a massive increase in the number of volunteers involved in the asset management world: in 2024, the IAM celebrated more than 600 people who contribute their spare time alongside their skills and knowledge. Many of these people also work full-time in the industry and have family commitments too. Yet they give an astonishing amount of their time to move the discipline forward. I find the fact that people want to do this, to make a difference, very inspiring. 

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