CNAM 2009: Building Foundations

3rd Annual CNAM Workshop

May 3 to 6, 2009 | Hyatt Regency | Calgary, Alberta

Under the theme "Building Foundations," The City of Calgary hosted more than 200 delegates at Canada's premier professional development and networking opportunity for municipal asset management professionals. The workshop covered three key themes in this emerging and quickly evolving field in Canada.

Bettering front-line service

Incorporating operational asset management techniques, including maintenance management, managing and planning for infrastructure condition and functionality, and developing capital and operating budgets for specific service areas, are important for municipalities. Presentations under this stream covered operational asset management that is happening in the trenches such as work order management, asset inspection programs and condition modelling, front-line service provision issues, performance measurement and benchmarking assets to meet service targets.

Building long-term strategy

Strategic infrastructure asset management is important to ensure the corporate-wide sustainability of municipal service provision. Strategic asset management is emerging as a suite of corporate-wide business planning processes, systems and tools that integrate the capitally intense operations business units to work towards a common, diligent infrastructure asset management approach. This stream included presentations outlining policy and strategy development, business intelligence, risk-based capital decision-making and business planning.

Balancing sustainable futures

Municipalities of all sizes are striving to ensure they provide the best place to live for their citizens, with sustainable infrastructure that is safe, reliable and affordable. Looking to the future, sustainability needs to be considered from both an operational and strategic perspective. Discussions in this stream incorporated a long-term view of the assets we manage using such tools as life cycle cost analysis, asset management planning and economic forecasting.