ICT - Enabled Innovation in Physical Asset Lifecycle Management (PALM): Challenges and Opportunities for Industry-Relevant Solutions

The Physical Asset Lifecycle Management function brings together a truly multidisciplinary set of competencies, ranging from different engineering disciplines, to environment, health and safety, management and finance, with normative and legislative issues also being a key concern. It is becoming a key consideration for organizations and enterprises aiming at sustainable operation and growth. Assets, products and technical infrastructure are not considered simply as means towards an end but are treated as individual value-entities, whose lifecycle needs to be adequately managed. This profound inter and intra organisation cultural change pertains to the operation and management of both small and large organizations and enterprises. The increasing trend is towards a deeper penetration of ICT innovation, fuelled by data and services integration at different levels. Technologies related to Internet of things, intelligent and cyber-physical systems, web-based, semantic and adaptive computing are now enabling better integration of assets, devices and decisions, while placing the human factor in the loop. The talk will discuss new challenges and opportunities that such ICT-enabled innovation integration brings to the rapidly evolving physical asset lifecycle management business landscape.