What is in a name? It is an age-old question. I thought I would explore our company name a bit further to help demonstrate what we think is a better way to approach facility and infrastructure asset management. The IAMS in Roth IAMS is not about dog food (yes we have heard that one before), but rather it stands for Integrated Asset Management Strategies.

The term Asset Management by itself is one of those words that has a definition that is wide enough to fly a 747 (a little homage to the world’s first jumbo jet as it is being retired) through. It can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Once you add Integrated to the front it can get even more confusing.

Over the next number of weeks, I will walk through the Integrated Asset Management (IAM) Framework that we use to explain our philosophy to our clients. The attached graphic presents the framework that we affectionately call “the Onion”, hence the title of the blog series.

At the highest level, IAM is about making better decisions on how to allocate your limited capital and maintenance dollars based on a clear understanding of the priorities of an organizations’ diverse group of stakeholders. As with many things in life, while it appears fairly simple and straight forward, actually doing it requires constant discipline and effort.

Although I am going to walk through the framework layer by layer in coming posts, it is critical to understand that IAM is not a linear process. The actual journey tends to be very iterative, with clients moving back and forth between the levels of the framework (or layers of the onion).

When I started out writing this post I thought it would be an 8-part series, with one intro and one summary post with six posts, one for each layer of the onion. However, at the time of posting this, I have not finished the series. However, with what I have written so far, it is likely going to be even longer.

I hope that you will join me on this journey over the next number of weeks exploring what we mean by IAM, and get a clearer picture of what the heck we are referring to when we talk about “the Onion”!