This article is a response to "The Space Between Moving and Settling" by Berend Booms, published on Future of Assets by Terrence O'Hanlon, Creator, Uptime® Elements

My friend and colleague Berend Booms wrote something last week that deserves more than a like and a scroll. In "The Space Between Moving and Settling," he compares moving his family into a new house to implementing a new CMMS or Enterprise Asset Management system — the months of preparation, the go-live anxiety, the weeks of not knowing where anything lives, and the slow arrival of familiarity.

He is right about all of it. And he is right about the deepest part almost in passing, when he observes that "confidence grows through repetition rather than through configuration." Read that sentence twice. Most implementation post-mortems never get that honest. The systems rarely fail. The transition of people into new ways of working is where success is won or lost and Berend documents that human journey with the kind of warmth you only get from someone who has lived it, boxes and all.

So this is not a correction. It is an extension. Because Berend put something else in his article, quietly, in the second paragraph, and I cannot stop thinking about it.

He signed for that house almost two years before moving day.

Think about what that means. Every decision that will shape his family's life in that home — where it sits, how it is structured, how the light falls, where that mysterious cable disappears to — was made long before the first box was packed. The move is the visible part. The exhausting part. The emotional part. But by moving day, the house is already decided. What remains is learning to live in it.

Our industry lives inside that same asymmetry, and mostly does not see it. A new CMMS or EAM system is a genuine achievement — it makes the work visible, the history retrievable, the planning possible. I have watched these implementations transform how organizations manage their maintenance. But here is the distinction that matters: a better system helps you manage failures with excellence. It cannot reach back in time and change what the asset is. The failures you will one day plan, schedule, and document so efficiently were largely decided at the moment someone specified and designed the asset — the industrial equivalent of Berend's signature, two years before the trucks arrived. By the time an asset becomes operational, roughly eighty percent of its lifecycle cost is already locked in.

Maintenance is a cost. Reliability is the investment. The organizations that understand the difference send their best thinking upstream — to the specification, to the design review, to the questions asked before anything is purchased or installed — because that is the only place failures are actually reduced rather than skillfully managed.

None of this diminishes what Berend wrote. It completes it. His article is about the space between moving and settling. Mine is about the space before the signature — the one nobody writes about because nothing dramatic happens there. No trucks. No boxes. Just decisions, made well or made carelessly, that everyone downstream will live with for decades.

Berend ends with a beautiful definition: settling in is when the unfamiliar quietly starts feeling like home. I would add one thing. The day will come when he stops noticing the house entirely — when it simply works, holds warmth, keeps the rain out, and asks nothing of him. That day will be the finest compliment his family ever pays to the people who specified and designed that house well. They will never meet them. They will never think of them.

That is what good upstream decisions earn: the privilege of being forgotten.

Welcome home, Berend.

Know. Be. Do. And create a future that was not going to happen anyway.