Sustainable Infrastructure Assets

Introduction

Sustainable development is today no longer an option but a key guiding principle for public and private infrastructure providers alike. At the forefront of the sustainability agenda is the creation of a sustainable infrastructure network. The provision of good infrastructure services is critical in achieving sustainability’s triple bottom-line goals, i.e., environmental, economic and social goals (Bithas and Christofakis, 2006). Infrastructure asset management has thus grown in importance in recent years (Too, Betts, & Kumar, 2006). As owners, operators and maintainers of infrastructure assets, organisations that manage infrastructure assets assume a significant responsibility in ensuring the successful performance of the assets to meet the service needs of their customers. At the heart of asset management is the concept of continuous improvement. Infrastructure organisations should be striving to improve operations, whether from the point of customer satisfaction, increased productivity, better asset quality, better environmental performance or a host of other performance indicators. The asset manager’s role embraces all of these concerns to some degree, as the physical infrastructure asset must support the organisation’s activities in ways that allow the organisation to service its customers in the best possible way.

Literature in strategy suggests that to understand an organisation’s performance, there is a need to focus on factors internal to the organisation, in addition to the industry structure. For example, Ravichandran et al. (2005) argued that organisations that focus on their resources and capabilities can provide the appropriate theoretical lens to examine how factors internal to the organisation can be a source of competitive advantage. An organisation can only gain advantage and achieve superior performance when it has the right capabilities (Smallwood & Panowyk, 2005). However, each industry is driven by its own demand and supply-side economics, which also change over time. One way to resolve this complexity, as suggested by Collis (1994), is to recognise that although the source of sustainable performance can be found in any one of a (very large) number of levels, valuable capabilities are dependent on the context of the industry and time. The notion that capabilities are context dependent is supported by Galunic and Rodan (1998). They suggested that capabilities developed for a specific purpose are unlikely to be used for other purposes. For example, the capabilities developed for R&D may not be appropriate for marketing of products and services (Lieberman & Montgomery, 1998). Similarly, in the context of time, Collis (1994) proposed that at any point in time in any one industry it may be possible to identify the capability that currently underpins sustainable superior performance. Hence, it is important that in identifying capabilities that are the sources of performance difference, they need to be contextually grounded (Ethiraj et al., 2005).