Will the requirements of ISO55000 for multi-skilled

Asset Managers herald the return of the Victorian

polymath engineer?
I.C. Miller*
* Principal Asset Management Consultant, CH2M Hill, UK,
E: ian.miller@ch2m.com, T: 0203 479 8755

1. Abstract
Brunel is regarded as a polymath in terms of his
wide range of skills and vision. The publication of the
ISO 55000 standard for Asset Management defines a
wide range of skill and competencies for future AM
practitioners. This presents challenges to both
individuals, institutions and education establishment.
Todays asset managers must follow in the footsteps
or stand on the shoulders of yesterdays great
engineers to develop the multi-disciplinary approach
to engineering that will really add value to the current
business environment

2. Main Text
The dictionary definition of a polymath is based on
the Greek source "having learned much"
- is a person whose expertise spans a significant
number of different subject areas; such a person is
known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to
solve specific problems.
With a career that embraced civil, structural,
mechanical and marine engineering, architecture, art
and design, Isambard Kingdom Brunel is rightly
regarded as a true polymath and one of the truly
great British engineers of the 19th century. Compared
with todays generation of engineers, Brunel was
incredibly versatile during his short, less than 40 year
career. More than an engineer he was a persuasive
visionary, able to convince people to finance his
projects even after earlier ones had failed. What is less
well known (or forgotten) is that Brunels father was
French and was so concerned that his son be educated
properly, he was sent to College of Caen in
Normandy, then at Lyce Henri-IV in Paris to
complete his secondary education. But he was already
being encouraged at an early age (8 years old) to draw
interesting buildings and identify any faults in their
structure! It is ironic to consider that when his father
had him presented as a candidate at the renowned
engineering school cole Polytechnique, as a
foreigner (from the UK) Brunel was deemed ineligible
for entry. Brunel subsequently studied under the
prominent master clockmaker and horologist

Abraham-Louis Breguet, by late 1822, having

completed his apprenticeship, Brunel returned to
England. Thus whilst we lay claim to Brunel as a
British engineer, the foundation of his outstanding
career in a wide range of engineering was the French
education system and clock making at that !
Whilst we may stand in awe of the feats of
engineering that Brunel achieved during his life, lets
not forget the effort he had to make to raise funds and
get Parliament to support these visionary designs.
All the great engineers and directors were regular
visitors to Westminster, Brunel, for example, made
233 appearances in total during his short career.
During the Parliamentary hearing in regard to his
controversial proposals for the Great Western
Railway, Brunel was cross examined over eleven
days. Ever the designer, he connects a piece of string
to a bell so that he can ring his lawyer awake each
morning of the hearing. After 56 days of waiting, the
committee gives their assent to Brunels vision. Thus
Brunel should be remembered as more than an
engineer he was a persuasive communicator, able to
convince people, even bankers, to finance his projects
and Parliament to approve them, even after earlier
ones had failed. It is easy, from this distance, to forget
how revolutionary these projects were at the time it
makes the consideration of HS2 seem positively
straight forward.
At the IAMs launch event for ISO55000 in February
2014, the view was expressed that in order to
implement this standard, asset managers would need
to develop a much wider range of skills and expertise.
If we are to follow the tenants laid out in ISO 55000,
Asset Management will require a multidisciplinary
understanding and approach; along with the IAM
Anatomy document, the ISO outlines the wide range
of disciplines covering engineering, finance,
operations, information systems, management,
contract and supplier management, human resources
and organisational development. The precise mix of
competencies that organisations and individuals, will
need depends on the context and circumstances they
are operating in but inevitably Asset Managers, as a
discipline, must develop an appreciation of all of these
and above all, be good communicators!

Thus I would like to explore the question, Does the

new ISO standard require a resurgence of polymath
managers like Brunel?
ISO55000 defines physical, financial, human or
intangible assets and the value realised from them
as the basis for any organisation delivering what it
aims to do in a sustainable manner. Thus best practice
asset management will be judged by maximising
value for money and satisfying stakeholders
expectations traits Brunel did not always excel in.
Brunels undertakings were often unheard of in their
scope, and it took great determination to pull them off
(or to fail in the attempt as with the fated Atmospheric
Railway). But while we recognise his engineering
skills and his vision, we must also acknowledge that
he did not always focus on costs (his budget for GWR
was 2m and he actually spent 6m!) or risk
management, let alone stakeholder management or
reliability centred maintenance although many of his
structures have stood the test of time when
compared to modern structures.
To match the aspirations of ISO55000, asset managers
will need not only to understand a broad range of
engineering issues, but also to embrace and
understand strategic business planning and financial,
risk and stakeholder management skills alongside
the technical vision Brunel demonstrated. Even more
importantly, they need to be able to communicate
their ideas and plans effectively at all levels of the
corporate hierarchy by providing business cases with
full financial, as well as technical details.
Whole life cost modelling, my personal specialism, is
an example of technique that requires engineering
knowledge of a wide range of assets, their degradation
behaviour over a period of time, along with financial
and contract knowledge to enable the model to
correctly predict the future costs of interventions. Not
to mention an understanding of discounting, nett
present value and the future value of money!
To take another skill that is now recognised as
essential to good asset management, the assessment
and management of risks. To assess risk, the Asset
Manager needs to identify the critical assets i.e. those
assets which could significantly impact the business if
they suffer unplanned downtime. To do this you need
to clearly understand how the business operates, what
functions really make money and what assets are
required to support this. As a practising risk manager,
I can speak from direct experience that this is not
always easy to identify and will need multistakeholder workshops to complete the exercise. As
part of my background is manufacturing, the link
between assets i.e. production line and output is
more obvious but in other industries; this dependence

it is less obvious in say, service sectors and perhaps

the critical assets are not even within the control of the
company itself power and IT networks come to
mind.
To gain this wide range of knowledge and experience
in applying it, will be a challenge for future
individuals who wish to pursue Asset Management.
They will need to plan their careers and experience to
gain this wide range of expertise, not an easy task in
an environment where jobs for life is distant
memory. Whilst I would not offer my eclectic career
as an exemplary example; in the past 40 years, I have
had 9 jobs across a range of sectors and companies,
necessitated in part due to two occurrences of
redundancy, it has furnished me, more by luck than
judgement, with a particular skill set that reasonably
matches the key requirements of ISO 55000.
There is also a challenge to the wider education
establishment. Even in my dim and distant days at a
grammar school, I was encouraged to specialise at
A level. I chose to follow an engineering career,
choosing Chemical Engineering degree which is a
blend of chemistry, mechanical engineering and
systems engineering. There was an old saying in our
department, that we could talk engineering to chemists
and chemistry to engineers a classic case of the one
eyed man is king in the land of the blind! But in
effect, I was already becoming specialised, with a
certain amount of tunnel vision. It was many years
later, when I became Head of Engineering at Thermos
Ltd (who remembers where your Thermos flask is?)
that I was dealing with the MD, Marketing and
Finance Directors, that I began to realise that my
engineering degree and experience (16 years post
graduate by that time) was insufficient to effectively
communicate with these peers and colleagues, whose
view of business was distinctly different.
Our education system and the Government, appear to
be fixated with degrees whereas, in my opinion, an
apprenticeship could offer a broader experience in a
specific industry, let alone providing more relevant
experience in life skills! Whilst I would applaud the
recent move towards apprenticeship based training, it
seems to be more driven by the lack of University
places and funds, rather than recognising the intrinsic
value of this alternative career path. This same trend
in part caused the demise of polytechnics that offered
a less academic focus and certainly more contact with
industry. As preparation for the future generation of
Asset Managers, I would suggest an apprenticeship or
sandwich course would be as good if not better
preparation than a pure academic degree.
The IAM has gone some way towards defining the
necessary skills and expertise in the form of the
recently amended Competency Framework but the

requirements of ISO55000 will add to the list of

required skills or at least focus the necessity. In
applying for membership of the IAM, I conducted a
self-assessment using the 7 competencies or roles that
the IAM defines and was pleasantly surprised how
many of the required skills I had accumulated over the
years. The irony is that I could have done with the
current knowledge when I was actively maintaining
industrial facilities 20 years ago but I guess that is
always an old mans regret! The more recently
launched IAM qualifications must also be
complimented the Certificate is aimed at those just
starting their journey in AM and is a useful check
list of which skills and experience are necessary.
Another bold step in the recognition of these
competencies would be the recognition of the IAM as
a chartered institution, which would enable our
relatively young discipline to flourish and for the
value it provides business to be recognised. This
would both support and compliment the spread of ISO
55000 across the globe, in that it provides a
recognised professional route for proponents of this
discipline and would help future corporations select
the right people to apply the standard and the gain the
most benefit to their business.
Until now, the development of engineering
institutions has focused on creating qualifications and
professional recognition in specific disciplines, civil
or mechanical engineering, and this had created silos
of knowledge and individuals that look inward.
Equally, while many are multi-disciplined in the
offering, the growth of engineering consultancies, of
which I have joined in recent years, has tended to
encourage greater and greater specialisation by
individuals and they need to respond by encouraging
cross functional working. In particular, I would call on
the engineering consultancy business to ensure that
their graduate intake get a wide range of experience
before specialising in their chosen subject, not least so
they understand other aspects and disciplines in their
own company.
In terms of education, it should be remembered that
Brunel was educated in England and France, covering
the classics in his early education but also learning
French (from his father no doubt) and also benefiting

from a different slant to his UK peers by being

educated in the continent. The most intriguing aspect
is that Brunel learnt his engineering as an apprentice
to a clock maker and yet went on to design innovative
railways, ships and even modular buildings for the
Crimea War effort (at Renkioi).
In trying to guess what our education system should
look like, to produce creative and multi-skilled
people, I am reminded of the words of Sir Ken
Robinson who has over recent years, consistently
challenged the way we're educating our children. One
of his many criticisms is that our current education
system does not encourage creativity, in fact it
reduces the natural creativity of kids. Creativity, in
his view, is the process of having original ideas that
have value, something we must agree that Brunel
excelled in. One of the pieces of research that
Robinson quotes is a survey of children using a
measure of creativity in essence the younger the
children, the higher they scored in this measure of
creative ideas, with under 5s scoring 98% and 1415 year olds scoring much less. His conclusion is that
we all have creative abilities when we are kids and our
current education model (and just growing up) tends
to stifle this creativity. Perhaps it is also the fear of
mistakes that prevents adults putting forward novel
ideas. In the context of asset management, I am
suggesting that we need to recognise the value of a
wide range of opinions, knowledge and skills in order
to achieve the optimum solution to gain value for our
economy but there is a wider problem with the
education system that reduces our vision and talent.
If we can learn anything from Brunel, it is that when
coupled with real vision, a combination of different
disciplines and technologies can result in such
quantum leaps as the SS Great Britain the first
propeller-driven, steam-powered, iron-hulled ship
ever to cross the Atlantic Ocean or the first modular
field hospital at Renkioi.
Todays asset managers must follow in the footsteps
or stand on the shoulders of yesterdays great
engineers to develop the multi-disciplinary approach
to asset management that will really add value to the
current business environment.