When organisations and societies have focused on boosting productivity, they have usually looked to labour to provide the gains.
The thinking has been that more educated and well-trained workers, or fewer workers toiling harder, are the answer to productivity issues. The equation has been to produce more with less. The human as the engine of productivity growth, however, is faltering.
In Australia, Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers made a speech in March which noted that Australia’s productivity had fallen to its lowest level in 60 years, averaging 1.1 per cent in the last five years.
Today, technology presents as the biggest opportunity for improved productivity. Skilled labour is short, the population is ageing, organisations want to cut down on costs, and automation in particular offers scale and efficiency. The cost of technology is coming down.
Automation though, does not exist by itself, it is enabled by the expanding world of the Internet of Things, where data is collected and can then be analysed and crunched to set the business rules around the automation.
This is not necessarily bad news for humans. The upside is that automation frees people from the drudgery of mundane work and enables them to skill up and also become more productive at the pointier end of their professions.
All this also applies in our world of asset management, where professionals are working with an unprecedented quantity of data to make more informed decisions.
The sharing of data and its use in digital twin environments for example, presents as an effective response to future challenges and uncertainties in asset management, according to KPMG’s Paul Low.
Low, who is KPMG’s National Industry Leader for Infrastructure, Government and Healthcare and a partner in Planning and Infrastructure Economics, advocates rigorous governance around data which can be brought into digital environments and shared to “align people around the shared outcomes” and goals of the organisation.
Paul’s colleague, Richard Threlfall, Global Head of Infrastructure, Government and Healthcare at KPMG, agrees, and will be developing the theme of governance in his upcoming keynote at the IPWEA International Asset Management Conference in June.
“We are moving from a world where project prioritization is based on mainly financial and commercial considerations, to a world where the impact of projects, from the perspective of multiple stakeholders, must prevail,” says Threlfall.
Growcom CEO, and former North Burnett Regional Council mayor, Rachel Chambers continues on the theme of governance.
From a small business background, Chambers found herself the most senior elected official of an organisation with around $1.1 billion in assets, an annual budget of around $50 million and 10,000 ratepayers across six small population centres.
“Elected officials are in a unique position. You have engineers who are experts and finance people who are experts and professional risk people and then you’ve got an elected official who just has to be operating without a criminal record, and that is the person making the final decision.
“So there’s a huge knowledge gap in that and a potentially high level of risk, so upskilling has to be a big focus.”
Rachel Chambers, Paul Low, and Richard Threlfell will be keynote speakers at IPWEA’s International Asset Management Congress to be held at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre in Broadbeach, Queensland from Wednesday 14 to Thursday 15 June, 2023. Find out more at www.amcongress.com.au
