Asset management

[2] The term is commonly used in engineering, the business world, and public infrastructure sectors to ensure a coordinated approach to the optimization of costs, risks, service/performance, and sustainability.

The ISO 55000 standard defines an asset as an "item, thing or entity that has potential or actual value to an organization".

It includes the management of the entire life cycle—including design, construction, commissioning, operating, maintaining, repairing, modifying, replacing, and decommissioning/disposal—of physical and infrastructure assets.

In September 2021, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG) jointly announced the development of natural asset companies (NACs), a new class of publicly tradable securities that hold rights to, and manage the productivity and ecological benefits of, 'natural assets' such as forests, marine areas, peatlands and farmland.

NACs attempt to assign value to 'ecosystem services' – such as carbon retention, freshwater generation, pest control, groundwater storage and erosion prevention.

Criticism's of these newly emerging forms of asset question the financial industries capacities given their historical legacies, as well their ongoing expropriation of land and labour.

Critics also suggest rendering the processes of life itself into commodities to be hoarded and traded by undemocratic and unregulated financial management companies and multi national corporations is not a responsible mode of stewardship for the perils of the planet during the '6th mass extinction'.

[18] The ISO 55000 series provides terminology, requirements, and guidance for implementing, maintaining and improving an effective asset management system.

GIS-centric asset registry standardizes data and improves interoperability, providing users the capability to reuse, coordinate, and share information efficiently and effectively.

A GIS platform combined with information of both the "hard" and "soft" assets helps to remove the traditional silos of departmental functions.

Asset managers need to make informed decisions to fulfill their organizational goals, this requires good asset information but also leadership, clarity of strategic priorities, competencies, inter-departmental collaboration and communications, workforce, and supply chain engagement, risk and change management systems, performance monitoring, and continual improvement.

On October 28, 2021, political leaders in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo signed an agreement with the Singapore shell company Hoch Standard, without the knowledge of Indigenous communities, giving the company title to the management and marketing of “natural capital/ecosystem services” on two million hectares of a forest ecosystem for one hundred to two hundred years. [ 13 ]