The Asset Management Division of Cambridge, Ontario

Building smart cities means utilizing and maintaining their strategic assets and infrastructure to make places better to live.  Cambridge, Ontario is doing several interesting things in the context of asset management.  From their website:

"In 2005 the City of Cambridge Council supported the development of an Asset Management Division, within the Transportation and Public Works Department. This allowed for the division to systematically collect infrastructure data and to embark upon a long-term approach to maintain, operate, rehabilitate, and replace City infrastructure (assets) to ensure they will provide the vital support of health and prosperity to the citizens and business community of today and our children of tomorrow."

Asset management in the context of sustainability and resiliency understands that more accurate information on where and how resources are being consumed can help cities and their citizens make more informed use of them and lower consumption.  From their website:

"Cambridge has adopted The National Guide to Infrastructure Sustainability which provides a strategic approach to implementing asset management. This approach leads to targeted maintenance, renewal, and replacement programs based on condition, service levels, and risk using life-cycle principles and detailed information about all assets.

Technology is an integral and essential part of Asset Management and as such, the City of Cambridge has made significant investments and acquired state of the art technology. Examples include harsh environment robotic video cameras, GPS, Geographic Information Systems by ESRI, Work Management Systems by IBM, and integrated databases by Oracle.

Technology is used to collect, organize, store and analyze the massive volume of data about the infrastructure network.

This enables the City to better access the short and long term cost of operating, maintaining, and renewing infrastructure to ensure that costs, revenue, reserves, and resources are managed effectively to avoid a degradation in service levels and/or abrupt future rate increases."

Better information aids organizations with the goal of making better decisions.  From their website:

"Asset Management uses information about the infrastructure that indicates the condition, cost, risk, level of service, history, and projected remaining serviceable life to systematically identify which parts of the systems have the greatest need for renewal or replacement. This enables staff to look for opportunities to maximize the City's best bang for the buck.

This degree of planning enables well thought out investments for today and will ensure that future generations will inherit infrastructure that has been well maintained, and operates efficiently and effectively."

Link to a presentation by IBM on Cambridge gives a good overview on connection between asset management and the ideas behind smart cities.  This is a video on the same subject: