By Berend Booms, Associate Editor | Future of Assets

This past weekend, my wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary. We took our boys to a spot we used to love, which has rebranded under new ownership and reopened earlier this year. Unfortunately, the food did not quite live up to memory; I guess some things really were better ‘back in the day’. Getting into this reflective mood made us reminisce about what life was like many moons ago, and the people we have become since our big day. It’s a conversation that has lingered in my head, turning into an introspection on how my working life has shaped up alongside my personal life. 

After I got my degree, the first “serious” job I had was a change management consultancy job at Cisco. It was the perfect job for that part of my life: I was still young, had very little to no responsibilities, and was eager to discover both the corporate and the physical world: the job allowed for plenty of both. I flew across the world to deliver end-user training and host workshops, both with the same goal: convincing people that leaving behind something familiar was worth the discomfort of learning something new.  

I had a great time and met many wonderful people. I liked the travel and getting to explore new places on my downtime, but at the end of the day I was always glad to come home. What I appreciate now much more than when I was living out of a suitcase is how much of what I was doing was really about people, and not about software at all. I used to think that my job was to teach people how to use a tool; what I was actually doing was helping them navigate change. I ventured out into this corporate IT world but got enthralled by the much more fundamentally human problem of how to deal with change. 

I did not set out to end up where I am today. Gradually, I got curious about how organizations run, what defines success, and how to foster it, and that curiosity led me all the way to maintenance, to reliability, and to wanting to figure out what’s behind the machinery that keeps modern life functioning without most of us ever noticing it. The answer, unsurprisingly, is people. I realized that most industrial organizations are at their core working through the same challenge I dealt with so many times working with Cisco: they are being asked to change how they operate, and rarely is technology the part that is most difficult to deal with.  

Standing On The Shoulders of Giants 

I’ve since had the privilege of hearing and learning that lesson from some great individuals who have lived it far longer than I have. I fondly remember my conversations with Johan Jansen van Rensburg. He’s spent nearly four decades in the field, has seen everything from the CMMS revolution of the early nineties through to the AI wave of today. Throughout it all, Johan taught me that the differentiator behind the successes of some and the failures of others was never technology. It was data integrity and discipline, the unglamorous fundamentals that everything else gets built on. I also recently spoke with Kevin Clark, who made the case that maintenance needs to become something people actually aspire to be a part of, not a fallback career.  

It’s conversations like these that have shaped how I think about our industry. Sure, the technology matters: predictive maintenance, digital twins, IoT and sensors, AI, none of that is hype. It’s actively shaping how organizations go about protecting their most critical equipment. But everyone I’ve spoken with who has lived through what is often touted as ‘transformative’ technology and seen it come and go tells me the same thing: technology only works if the people using it are listened to, involved, informed, instructed, trusted, and given a real reason to believe in it. 

People Over Process 

Today, I'm the associate editor for Future of Assets. My work no longer involves standing in front of a room convincing people that a new tool is worth adopting. Instead, I spend my time listening to the people doing that convincing themselves, out on the floor, in the control room, in the boardroom, and trying to tell their stories honestly. It’s a different type of role, in a different environment, with different responsibilities and different rules of engagement. The one thing that has not changed is that at the root of it all, the principal challenges I’m discussing are still fundamentally human. 

For more than a decade, my wife has watched this unfold from the outside. She’s seen me wake up at the break of dawn to travel to my next Cisco workshop, and now watches me work late into the afternoon because I’m talking to a reliability leader on the other side of the world. I’m not sure she always understands why I find this industry so compelling. I’m pretty sure I’ve done a terrible job trying to explain it. But she understands it matters to me, which I’m really thankful for.  

Looking back, I’m starting to realize that the work I care about most has always been about helping people feel heard and seen during moments of change. People want to know they still matter when the tools around them change. It’s a sentiment I think is true of relationships as well. It’s not about being right all the time and getting every decision right; it’s about showing up consistently enough that the small mistakes don’t start defining the whole journey. 

‘til Failure Do Us Part 

What’s fascinating to me is that our industry is still so young, despite some of us managing assets that will outlast most of us in it. At the same time, it’s also mature enough to have watched reactive maintenance give way to predictive strategies, to have watched data integrity move from being an afterthought to the foundation everything stands on, to have earned not just a spot on the agenda but a seat at the boardroom table, and to be reckoning seriously with the fact that its people, not technology, that will shape the future of assets and the future of maintenance.  

The restaurant we went back to did not taste the way I remembered. It took me a while to understand that this was the wrong thing to be disappointed about. The spot was still in the same place, in the same building, and the food was probably still cooked in the same kitchen. That’s what brings me back to our industry: the equipment often stays the same. The people responsible for running, managing and maintaining it don't get that luxury.