For institutional owners
The handover is where the money leaks.
Hospitals, universities, colleges, school boards, utilities, ports and airports run continuous capital programs against assets they will hold for fifty years. The problem is rarely the project. It is what arrives at the end of it.
The problem, named
Receiving scanned drawings and a box of manuals
It is the outcome operations teams describe most often. A capital project completes, the register is rebuilt from scratch, and the information that would have made the next twenty years of renewal decisions cheaper is not in a form anyone can use.
Two things cause it, and both are specifiable. The information requirements were never written into the contract, so the supply chain was never asked. And there was no gate at handover, so nothing was checked. The specification without the gate is a request. The gate without the specification is unenforceable.
Two business dimensions
Where the pressure usually sits
Technology and Process, at the construction-to-operations boundary. Asset data arrives incomplete and then decays after handover.
Governance, because a published standard nobody applies does not move anything. And because in most institutions the capital group and the operations group answer to different executives, on different cycles, with different definitions of done.
The gap is trust before it is technology, and trust is a governance problem.
Findings
What the diagnostic usually surfaces first
- Asset information requirements that exist as a policy but not as a contract clause
- A common data environment in use for delivery but not for operations
- Naming conventions that differ between the capital group, the maintenance system and the finance system
- No gate at handover, so incomplete information has never been formally refused
- Condition data collected on a cycle that does not match the renewal decision cycle
This is the difference between an information asset and a set of files that expire with a licence.