By Berend Booms, Associate Editor | Future of Assets
My kids and I are enjoying our last weeks of the summer holiday. With school out for the summer and the kids around the house all day, we’re spending a lot of time together doing things we all enjoy. One of the things we have found ourselves doing together is playing video games. I have been playing video games for as long as I can remember, so I’m delighted to share in these activities with my boys. I have always been the kind of person who puts considerable effort into understanding and eventually mastering whatever game I am playing. One of the ‘skills’ that transfers to most games I play with my kids is finding my way around the world or map.
Having a good understanding of where I am as a player, and where you are meant to be going, means that I can often guide my kids and help them figure out what we need to do next. It’s a skill that I’ve honed over many years, going back to a time when games offered no mini-maps or quest markers to help you out. When I first started gaming, you had to constantly pay attention: if you did not remember how to get back to town, if you did not internalize where particular enemies tended to appear, or if you did not figure out how to get past certain bosses, you were going to have a really hard time.
Over the years, the worlds we explore in games have become more sophisticated, and so have the maps that are used to navigate them. For me, few games have ever come close to World of Warcraft in terms of the enjoyment and sheer sense of immersion it offered. Here, the map you navigate becomes a way of understanding how this enormous world fits together. In strategy games, the map provides a completely different perspective, helping you understand how resources and infrastructure are distributed across the world and where opportunities or threats might emerge as a result. First-person shooter games are another favorite of mine. In the game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, spatial awareness becomes fundamental to survival: a perfectly safe location can become dangerous within mere minutes when the circumstances around you change.
Across every genre of video games I enjoy, having a map has always proven to be extremely valuable. But unlike conventional maps, the real value rarely comes from knowing where something is located. What matters most is understanding what this location means within the context of a wider environment.
That same principle has an interesting parallel in how we use Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, in asset management. These systems provide the important spatial dimension to how many organizations interpret their asset landscape. They are particularly relevant for organizations managing geographically distributed assets such as electricity networks, pipelines, railways, roads, and water infrastructure, where an asset rarely makes much sense when considered entirely in isolation.
The asset record within an EAM or CMMS tells us a great deal about a transformer, pole, section of track, or pump. It helps us understand its age, condition, maintenance history, outstanding work, and other characteristics. GIS adds another layer of context by helping us understand where that asset exists within the physical world and how its location relates to the environment and infrastructure around it. The map is no longer about the destination or location; it’s about everything you’re likely to encounter should you venture out to seek it.
When Location Becomes Context
An asset’s surroundings and environment provide context that the asset registration likely does not. Let’s take, for example, a railway track running alongside a mountain. Knowing where a particular section of track is located gives us a starting point, but the surrounding environment can tell us so much more: the gradient and curvature of the route, nearby slopes, drainage patterns, vegetation, soil conditions, and exposure to changing weather all influence how that section of track behaves and deteriorates over time. Place that same section of track in a different environment, and its maintenance requirements and risk profile could look very different.
Increasingly, organizations are beginning to realize the benefit of combining these different perspectives. Asset condition and maintenance history can sit alongside spatial information, environmental data, imagery, operational information, and other sources that help people understand the circumstances in which an asset operates. In that environment, GIS contributes something broader than mapping; it becomes part of how organizations establish context around decisions.
I think video games provide an interesting perspective on where this could eventually take us. They have become exceptional at simulating high-pressure situations, in which people have to make split-second decisions, observe the consequences, and adjust accordingly. Military organizations have used war games and simulations for a long time to explore scenarios and develop decision-making, while simulation technology is increasingly used elsewhere to prepare people for situations that would be expensive, dangerous, or impractical to recreate physically. Gamification has also found its way into areas such as training and learning, borrowing selected principles from games to create environments in which people can practice and develop skills.
There are, of course, important limits to this comparison. An industrial facility is fundamentally different from a virtual world, and managing physical infrastructure carries responsibilities that a game never can. Yet there is something valuable in the underlying principle of creating environments in which we can explore consequences before experiencing them in reality. It’s for that very reason that I think deeper integration between systems such as our CMMS or EAM and increasingly rich digital representations of our physical environments is such a worthwhile undertaking. As our digital representations of physical assets become richer, the question gradually moves beyond understanding where our assets are and toward understanding what might happen when circumstances change.
What happens to production if a particular asset fails? How does the risk profile change when extreme weather approaches? Where should resources be positioned before a major event, and how might one intervention affect other parts of the system?
Answering questions like these requires far more than GIS alone. When we combine asset information, environmental data, digital twins, simulations, and increasingly AI, spatial context becomes part of a much richer environment for exploring decisions before committing them to the physical world.
Understanding the Map Before Making the Move
The consequences of making the wrong decision in a game are usually inexpensive. At worst, you lose your progress or have to start a new match. It is precisely this freedom to experiment at relatively low to no cost that makes games such effective learning environments: they allow us to experience consequences without having to carry them very far.
Asset management is a discipline with considerably less room for experimentation. The physical world does not allow us to reload or start over when something goes wrong; decisions taken can affect production, reliability, safety, the environment, and the communities that depend on our assets or the services they provide. This is what makes the ability to understand context before acting so valuable.
On these long summer days, I’m happy to help my kids find their way around the games they like to play, making sense of what is happening around them and showing them how the decisions they make influence what happens next. GIS brings some of that same spatial perspective into the much more consequential world of physical assets, helping us see individual assets as parts of environments and systems that are continuously interacting. As those representations become richer, perhaps the most interesting opportunity is our growing ability to do something my four-year-old seems capable of doing endlessly, asking the really important question:
What happens next?
Whether we are finding our way through a game or managing the assets that support the world around us, understanding what could happen next gives us a better chance of making the right decision today.