Champions: Shafiq Alam, Department of Transport and Main Roads, Queensland, Australia; and Steven Male, University of Bristol, UK
Abstract submissions: 31 October 2022
Full submissions: 28 February 2023
A themed issue of Infrastructure Asset Management is planned for 2023 on corporate infrastructure asset management – an unexplored domain of business significance.
Corporate asset infrastructure, covering government and non-government offices, industry complexes, workspaces in various public assets like educational, shopping and hospital buildings, has embraced rapid transformation since the advent of information technology driven decision process in the late twentieth century. The rapid spread of internet facilitated networking of offices and support services across the world for remote working has provided big building blocks which are reshaping new organisational structures. Workspace is becoming more open-spaced with meeting rooms and hot desking, together with the strategic consideration of exactly what corporate spatial assets are now required to deal with hybrid working from offices and from home. The impact of climate change and changing transport requirements, behavioural change and travel patterns are also likely to accelerate this move.
The Covid-19 pandemic quickly established work from home as a suitable option both for the employees and employers. As a result, workspaces, furniture, and other hard and soft assets are becoming redundant in abundance, while there are now significant demands for home office arrangements and information technology centric assets. The pandemic further dictates extensive health and wellbeing requirements related changes in the office asset settings. The rapid changes of corporate asset formation over the last few decades created significant costs and management concerns from sustainability, resilience and level of analysis for example strategic, tactical and operational aspects. Abstracts are invited for papers adopting theoretical, empirical, or case-study based approaches on topics including, but not limited to:
- Risks of poor investment in corporate asset infrastructures for the future due to uncertain demand factors.
- The significant organisational change challenges this creates for managing corporate infrastructure assets in general.
- Inappropriate design standard and specification for life cycle performance requirements with frequent changes.
- Business overhead cost increase due to more frequent changes to corporate establishments and higher health and wellbeing requirements.
- Impact on supply chain management for rapidly changing furniture and materials requirements.
- Development challenge for related systems and processes due to inadequate condition and performance data regime for the shorter working life of a particular workspace settings.
- Professional challenges for delivering designs conforming to socio-cultural and environmental / climatic requirements due to limited academic and technical studies usual for a rapidly evolving industrial setting.
- Management of non-building asset, such as vehicle fleet, information technology, safety, security, and others in a sustainable manner.
Engineering practitioners and researchers engaged in any of the above or related topics are invited to submit abstracts by 30 September 2022. Relevant papers outside the main themes outlined above will also be considered.
