Towards an integrated perspective on fleet asset management: engineering and governance considerations

The traditional engineering perspective on asset management concentrates on the operational performance the assets. This perspective aims at managing assets through their life-cycle, from technical specification, to acquisition, operation including maintenance, and disposal. However, the engineering perspective often takes for granted organizational-level factors. For example, a focus on performance at the asset level may lead to ignore performance measures at the business unit level. The governance perspective on asset management usually concentrates on organizational factors, and measures performance in financial terms. In doing so, the governance perspective tends to ignore the engineering considerations required for optimal asset performance. These two perspectives often take each other for granted. However experience demonstrates that an exclusive focus on one or the other may lead to sub-optimal performance. For example, the two perspectives have different time frames: engineering considers the long term asset life-cycle whereas the organizational time frame is based on a yearly financial calendar. Asset fleets provide a relevant and important context to investigate the interaction between engineering and governance views on asset management as fleets have distributed system characteristics. In this project we investigate how engineering and governance perspectives can be reconciled and integrated to enable optimal asset and organizational performance in the context of asset fleets

Educational Reform in Developing Countries: Private Involvement and Partnerships

The paper looks at recent changes in the role of government in the provision of education in Developing Countries. It begins with a reflection about the concept of public-private partnership (PPP), discusses the rationale that inspires the ‘contracting out’ of educational services and describes several cases of private sector involvement in education. After looking at the conditions for building PPPs and the necessary requirements for assuring an effective regulatory framework, the paper closes concluding that while contracting out needs not be made a priority there is a large room for other forms of private sector involvement in education in developing countries.Contracting out, educational reform, market/government failure, NPM, public-private partnerships.