When Ursula Bryan began her career in asset management in the early 1990’s she wanted to join an organisation with a clear purpose.
Then a young mathematics graduate, Bryan joined UK power infrastructure provider National Grid in a multi-disciplinary team which was applying business modelling to improve the performance of the grid and “solve real world problems”.
At National Grid, Bryan was part of an organisation enabling the UK to access power “at the flick of a switch” for industry, business and for the daily lives of millions of British households.
“That idea of having a very clear purpose has been really important to me my entire career,” says Bryan.
Her commitment to purpose then moved in tandem through her involvement with professional industry body the Institute of Asset Management, beginning in the mid 1990s and then joining the board in 2009.
After becoming the IAM’s President in 2019, Bryan moved into a full time role as IAM’s Chief Executive in 2022, where she has found a fresh purpose in engaging with asset management professionals at every level across the world.
Asset management is a sector with a clear mission, she says, with infrastructure delivering vital services to communities and making a critical contribution to the quality of life of people and economies.
Bryan gives a shout out to the 500 or so volunteers who give up their time to work with the IAM as evidence that her views on purpose are widely shared.
“These volunteers wouldn’t give up their time unless they had a very strong sense of purpose in what furthering the asset management discipline can achieve,” she says.
“Our volunteers have real lives and real jobs, but they all carve out time to give back in a way they would only do because they are really driven to do it”.
Bryan also observes changes in asset management over her three decade career, with a greater understanding of the wider value the discipline can deliver to the public and the economy.
Where once it was more narrowly focused on individual organisations or industry sectors, now there is a greater understanding of how all assets and infrastructure combine in a holistic way to deliver value to communities by positively impacting global challenges such as climate change.
“Asset management has always been an integrated discipline, but there is a growing evolution integrating different sectors of assets and networks,” says Bryan.
“The transport and electricity networks, for example, are inextricably linked now, because if you are electrifying or you’re looking at hydrogen solutions for transport then the sectors are more dependent on each other than ever before.
“This requires asset management to be much more integrated, which requires working with stakeholders to think about the societal outcomes you are trying to deliver because any one sector can’t deliver all of them on their own.”
The development of asset management in the UK, which received impetus from the waves of privatisation of utilities in the early 1990s was originally driven by the need for efficiency.
Today, this has widened from utilities and into sectors such as housing, manufacturing and the military where it is seen as a way to achieve excellence and a competitive advantage.
Bryan also notes another change in asset management and sees an evolution in understanding outcomes and value.
“Asset management is there to help realise value from assets and there has been development of the understanding of value, which is multi-faceted,” she says.
“We are exploring the ‘six capitals’ when we think about dimensions of value, and after financial, manufactured, intellectual value there is human, social and natural value.”
In facilitating these changes, Bryan is excited at the “massive opportunities” presented by technologies such as artificial intelligence and digital twinning to meet today’s challenges.
“When I started I was submitting scenarios into a water-cooled mainframe in London which used to have to run the studies overnight because they were too big to run during the day because they would disrupt everyone else,” she says.
“What I was doing then I could probably do today on my phone.”
Bryan’s message is that now is an exciting time in asset management with the discipline gaining momentum, evolving in its thinking and gaining greater traction with more key stakeholders.
“I actually believe that asset management is a life skill, but it’s a comparatively young discipline, having been formally recognised for only 30 or 40 years,” she says.
“We all own assets and we all interact with assets everyday, and I think that a greater understanding of asset management would be a fundamental benefit to the world at large.”
Ursula Bryan will be a speaker at the IPWEA International Asset Management Congress to be held in Canberra on November 28 and 29.
