Effect of Web-based engineering information on asset management

Abstract

For decades, infrastructure in the United States has been developed with little or no regard to the long-term cost of its maintenance and operation. As of June 1999, state and local governments in the United States are subject to new accounting measures contained in the Governmental Accounting Standards Board's Statement 34. These new guidelines relate to the method that infrastructure assets are accounted for in annual financial statements. In addition, with the release of the American Bar Association's 2000 Model Procurement Code, these governments are now authorized to explore the benefits of using alternate project delivery methods for capital programs as well as maintenance and operation for infrastructure assets. A variety of asset management tools have recently been developed to ease the passage into GASB 34 compliance for local governments to include a web-based program called Barchan. My goal as part of a two-person research team was to implement and test Barchan in a sample town, Winchester, MA. During this process, and after research into the current project-delivery environment, further applications for such programs were realized and discussed. Such programs provide a public procurement agency with a wide variety of easily accessible and updateable engineering information. This engineering information can be used to facilitate decisions to utilize alternate project delivery methods and provide a benchmark to evaluate their effectiveness.