Overview

The 2018/19 Government Policy Statement (GPS) sets an expectation of the Transport Agency to ‘deliver the right infrastructure … at the best cost’ as part of the ‘value for money’ theme. This calls for a more mature approach to whole-of-life asset and activity management, and greater consistency across the land transport sector. The continued development of individual solutions to common problems is inefficient. We need reliable and sharable information about land transport assets across their lifecycle to drive more informed investment decisions.

The Treasury’s National Infrastructure Plan(external link) also highlights the importance of the development of ‘national, shared, open data standards for infrastructure’. It is one of the key focus areas.

The Asset Management Data Standard (AMDS) project will develop and implement a national, shared data standard for land transport infrastructure assets.  It will be a way of defining and describing land transport assets, their attributes, characteristics, properties, location and performance to enable efficient and effective end-to-end life cycle asset management.

At the same time, other public infrastructure owners such as the water and broader utilities sector are also progressing their national, shared, open data standards. This means we need to work collaboratively to ensure the interdependencies are better understood and, where necessary, the data standards for similar land transport assets are aligned to give a joined-up view of public infrastructure.

Benefits of AMDS

The data standard for land transport assets will offer a consistent, integrated approach to data structures and asset management. It will enable better asset data acquisition and analytics, better management of land transport asset data and greater opportunities for sharing and collaboration.

This will help with forward work planning, strategic asset management and improved sector-wide investment decisions because of a richer, consistent, spatially-enabled evidence base.

Our vision is to share transport asset data within and between organisations easily, so decision makers can access and confidently use all relevant information wherever they are, whenever they want, whoever has provided it.

Project scope

The AMDS project scope includes:

• developing a national asset management data standard for land transport infrastructure assets that includes location and geospatial standards
• supporting the sector to implement the national asset management data standard
• providing ongoing monitoring and management post-project with a business as usual (BAU) model.

Work programme and timeline

Following Investment Logic workshops, an initial business case was developed in 2018 with participation from the sector – the councils, contractors and technical consultants. An Indicative Business Case is now being prepared.

The projected timeline for this work is: