Asset Management Insights. Celso de Azevedo

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       Foreword

       The Emergence of a Necessity

      To produce a historical account of our discipline’s genesis would be an exercise both tedious and, in the end, only sparsely instructive. What strikes us as more pressing, considering the shortfalls, the approximations, and the genuine mistakes made on a regular basis by some of those who claim to know our subject’s intricate workings, is to come back to the deeply rooted causes of its emergence in order to demonstrate that its development was inscribed in a rationale of necessity.

      In the 1980s, as in other turning moments in history, the industrial and infrastructural worlds experienced a paradigm shift, thus setting the scene for a positive transformation of our relation to the management of assets, namely the means (physical or not) through which an organization seeks to extract value from the assets’ operation throughout their life cycles. By illustrating this progression, we hope to shed a light on the foundations and the inherent dynamics and logics of Asset Management, as well as to respond to the questions and criticisms expressed by those who claim, against all reason, to view it as nothing more than a superfluous appendix of industrial maintenance or, for that matter, of any operational discipline that plays a part in the challenges of Asset Management without embodying its totality.

      Similarly, we wish to prove wrong those who, failing to understand our discipline’s mechanisms, dogmatize it to the point of rigidity; the very self-proclaimed experts who, when they are not busy dogmatizing Asset Management, feel entitled to discuss it even though they can only boast a superficial or partial knowledge of the matter. In other words, we intend to provide a positive vision of the management of assets, founded on a true conceptual rigor but exemplified by experience.

      Needless to say, this demonstration cannot claim to offer a somewhat utopian character of certainty. I myself have been so lucky as to pursue just about the entirety of my career in this discipline’s emergence and momentum; therefore, my perspective is eminently initiatory, and simultaneously covers a practice spread over several decades, a conceptual stack validated by empiricism, and the occasional trials and errors of the scientific thought.

      Furthermore, it goes without saying that the history of scientific thought should not be devised as a straight axis, whizzing through the ages without twisting and turning. On the contrary, we know that science advances through experience, and therefore through trials and failures—progress deriving, in fine, from our right to make mistakes. This road towards progress is therefore characterized by the systematic confrontation of “old” questions to innovative and crystallizing solutions, themselves made available by the frequent theoretical achievements СКАЧАТЬ